


Besieged Fortress

by AJHall



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M, seven years on, uneasy peace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 31,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven years on, Ralph and Laurie have found a precarious refuge together in Gibraltar. But in the post-War world attitudes are hardening and positions becoming polarised, and they find themselves engaged in a new conflict, one in which they may not necessarily be on the same side. And then an unexpected visitor arrives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again._

The opening line of yesterday's film had stuck in Ralph's mind. It had, when he'd heard it, inescapably dragged him back to the first and last time he'd sailed into Rangoon, and his glorious few days' leave exploring up-country, even though (despite not having read the book) he knew that wasn't really the point.

Since that day the Japanese had torn their way down the peninsula, and been forced all the way back, step by step, by the dedicated weight of Chindits and Ghurkas and tough men from obscure little regiments from the odd rough parts of Britain, and Ralph had gloried in their triumph and never wanted to see what wounds they'd inflicted on magical Burma in the process. He kept his Mandalay safe inside his head, where no enemy could reach it. 

Which, perhaps, had more relevance to the film than the simple coincidence in sound between two names, after all.

He hadn't expected to enjoy it, and certainly not expected it to be Laurie's cup of tea, but they'd had to go somewhere - that morning Laurie had had a typewritten letter from England, postmarked London and almost certainly from his publisher. When Ralph had got back from the shipping office (as ever, too many officers for too few berths, but the chance of a first officer's post on a big transatlantic mixed cargo carrier was in the offing; the owner's agent had been quietly encouraging and it was only a week or so away; the current first officer would clearly be discharged as soon as the boat touched land, and Gib was as close as anywhere, and the few days' grace was convenient, too, for Ralph's own plans) the door to his study had been firmly shut, and though Ralph had waited quietly in the living room, reading and jotting down notes in his hard-back note-book, he had heard no sound from the typewriter during the whole of the two hours it took before Laurie finally emerged. Through the open door behind he could see there was an overflowing ashtray next to the idle Imperial machine, though Laurie was a light smoker usually. The waste-paper basket was stuffed to the brim with the crumpled discards of aborted beginnings. Laurie's eyes were bistred around the orbits, and the stale cigarette smoke which hung about his hair and clothes was bitter like the taste of defeat. He looked across at Ralph as though daring him to say anything, but Ralph had already concluded by then that there was nothing he could reasonably say. There was something he could do, though, and he did it. Laurie turned, relaxing into the curve of his arm, warm against his chest, acknowledging without words his support as they made their way upstairs, where he did whatever skill and generosity suggested to assuage the corrosive pain of a long defeat.

Much later, as dusk was falling over the Rock and, through the strip of the skylight the first stars were beginning to appear, Ralph had propped himself up on his elbow, and said, "What you need is an evening out. Take your mind off things. If we hurry, we could get the last house at the flicks."

And, sleepily acquiescent (conscious, perhaps, of the need to get out of a house where the Imperial machine constantly expressed its own silent criticism?) Laurie had agreed; no matter what might be on offer at the antiquated and draughty little flea-pit down by the docks.

It had worked, too. Predictably, the film had broken down shortly before the second reel; he and Laurie (old hands by the standards of the transient Gibraltarian population) had first been among the group who had shouted advice to the hapless projectionist, and had then been the ones who piled in to assist physically with the repairs. Laurie, as it happened, had remembered the precise tweak to the antiquated and Bolshie equipment which set it right; the whole house (packed as they ever were; entertainment was scanty at this furthermost outpost of Europe) had erupted in cheers for his skill, and he had turned, caught for a moment in the projector's beam, and given the house a cheeky, gallant, sweeping player's bow: Ralph had caught his breath remembering (not that he had ever really forgotten!) a Laertes seen from the third row years ago.

And after the final credits the owner of the flea-pit, on the excuse of its being his birthday, had swept Ralph, Laurie, a handful of other regulars and the staff up and off for drinks at a bar down on the water-front, owned by Nikos, a Greek who'd been pushed out of Smyryna by the Turks in the '20s, and whom the fortunes of war had driven ever westward, so that only the Pillars of Hercules stood between him and what his remote, archaic ancestors had known as Ultima Thule. Ralph and the projectionist (who doubled as a tunny fisherman, and sometime smuggler) had got into an amused, technical argument in a mixture of English, Spanish and llanito about the last reel, and how practically one might bring off the job of scuttling a boat, leaving a corpse aboard, and getting ashore in a storm sufficiently violent to give credence to the notion of the whole thing having been a tragic accident, with Laurie throwing ever more farcical suggestions into the mix.

Very much later, when Laurie - the laughter gloriously back in his face, informing the crinkles around his mouth and the light in his eyes - and he had walked - a trifle unsteadily - back round the sweep of the harbour and up the hill towards their own house, he had congratulated himself; as someone who comes into a strange harbour beset by rocks (he remembered Saint Malo, that first time) might congratulate himself of having averted the perils the day afforded, and acquitted himself with credit.

But that had been before today. Someone had come round to the house while they were breakfasting with a note addressed to Laurie.

Laurie, having read it, wrinkled his forehead ruefully and passed it across to Ralph without comment.

Ralph took a sip of chicory-laden coffee - the proceeds of mutually profitable barter with the master of a tramp steamer registered out of Marseilles - and raised his eyebrows. "Edward Longenhurst? Cocktails this evening at the Rock Hotel? Who is this bloke?"

Laurie sighed. "He's my publisher's nephew. My publisher did actually ask if I'd look after him if he got to Gib, but I was rather hoping he'd forgotten. But in the circs -"

He spread a hand in a defeated-looking gesture which Ralph had no problem decoding: the history of missed deadlines, spent advances, and Laurie's self-evident fear that his own doubts about whether he could move beyond being the author of a critically and commercially acclaimed debut novel, now pushed aside in the public's mind by three intervening years of newer, sharper publishing sensations, were finally being shared by his publisher.

"Well," Ralph said, "however much of a stumer the chap turns out to be, I daresay we can both survive a few hours of it. What brings him to Gib?"

Laurie's voice was absolutely toneless. "He's on his way to Tangier. He plans - ah - to immerse himself completely in the culture of the country."

Their eyes met in perfect understanding.

"Well," Ralph said crisply, "in that case let's hope for his own sake he doesn't have an allergy to penicillin."

The subject disposed of, he turned his attention to considering the dying throes of the English county cricket season, in a week-old _Times_ he had picked up at the shipping office.


	2. Chapter 2

Longenhurst (his opening line had been "Do call me Teddy, dear boys," but Ralph had absolutely no intention of taking him up on the invitation, and had successfully avoided calling him anything for the whole of the evening so far) was in essence nothing more or less than experience had taught him to expect, but unimaginably dreadful when one came down to details.

In fact, a few hours into his acquaintance Ralph felt, in the words of Noel Coward, as if slimy things were crawling all over him.

He had not been in his presence more than a few minutes before realising that Longenhurst was one of those people who always made him acutely conscious of his maimed hand. Spud, too, was clearly on edge: there were little tense lines about his mouth and once, when Longenhurst had turned his gaze full on him, making as though he put his whole soul in the look, Ralph had seen his fingers tighten round the stem of his glass so convulsively he had feared it might snap.

And Longenhurst's attitude to Spud was without doubt the most objectionable thing about him: part hero-worshipping, part proprietorial, like a pilgrim ostentatiously performing his devotions in the shrine to a god he had invented himself.

They went from cocktails to a meal in a small restaurant overlooking the harbour whose philosophy was to catch it in the morning; land it in the afternoon; grill it in the evening. After that they moved on to Nikos' bar for more drinks.

Longenhurst, taking advantage of a brief absence on Laurie's part, leant confidentially over to Ralph.

"I'm sure someone in _your_ line of work would know _all_ about the 'local colour'. So tell me, dear boy, where does one go if one wishes to make the end of the evening truly memorable, eh?"

Punching the bastard's fat face being off-limits, Ralph toyed briefly with the notion of directing him towards _Alfonso's_ , a dive notorious even by the standards of Castle Steps.

Regretfully he abandoned the idea. It would hardly help Spud's relations with his publisher if his nephew fetched up robbed and rolled on his recommendation. Fighting back his revulsion at the assumptions about their relationship that must have driven Longenhurst to direct the question to him rather than to Laurie, Ralph fell back on the matelot's time-honoured resource of assumed stupidity.

"There's a night-club called Jackson's the Americans use a lot when they're in town," he said. "The jazz-band's particularly good, they tell me. And the cabaret girls are said to be very pretty. Not that night-clubs are much in my line, sorry."

And he smiled blandly back into Longenhurst's face, black murder in his heart, just as Laurie returned to the table.

Thereafter Longenhurst had directed his conversation pointedly towards Laurie, and confined its topic to a stream of bitchery about literary London, and its inhabitants, fulsomely comparing the giants of the literary world unfavourably to Laurie, in the face of which Spud became visibly more unhappy. In order to break up a long exposition, laced with amateur psychoanalysis and hints of intimate inner knowledge - which got broader as the wine circulated - about how an author Ralph happened to admire profoundly would never produce anything worth reading until he managed to conquer his "inhibitions and petty burgeois prejudices" Ralph said, "So - ah - Longenhurst, do you write yourself at all?"

Longenhurst turned towards him with a disbelieving expression on his jowly features, as though wondering why barbarians such as he were allowed indoors in the first place. Beside him Ralph felt Spud tense, as though just waiting for the starter's pistol to fire him into violent action. He gave him a tight, taut smile and a tiny shake of the head.

Longenhurst relaxed back into his chair suddenly, and topped up his glass. "Well, of course, I could hardly have expected you to hear about my little play. So far away from civilisation as you live - Laurie, my dear, I'm amazed you can stand it. Great talent needs a world stage on which to display itself, not some rough boards nailed together by peasants in a cowshed at the back of beyond."

He cast a glance here and there about the smoke-blackened bar; across at Niko, arguing with a couple of patrons - amiably enough but with the Levantine intensity which always makes it appear to the bystander as though knives will be drawn any minute - at Rodriguez and Philippe at the adjoining table, looking even more piratical than usual as they played backgammon and drank raki - at the motley assortment of paintings on the dark wood-panelled walls, which looked as if they had been purloinedfrom the attic of a Victorian merchant prince: an incongrous jumble in which _The Monarch of The Glen_ confronted _The Raft of the Medusa_ \- and raised an eyebrow pointedly.

Laurie, whose clear skin always showed anger or embarassment vividly, flushed dark red. 

Hatred - simple, incadescent and unadultered - flowed momentarily through Ralph's veins. He had, however, not lost his ability to become icier rather than hotter the greater the provocation offered him. And this appalling man could do Laurie harm if allowed. He made as though the by-play had passed over him completely, and put a note of polite interest into his voice.

"So, has your play been a success?"

Longenhurst turned towards him, and tittered.

"Well, a _succès de scandale_ certainly. I had found a management who actually had the _vision_ and the _courage_ to put it into production. But then I got the most horrid letter from the Lord Chamberlain - saying that "it represented the foetid outpourings of an infinitely degraded imagination" and that "he could not imagine any possible changes which would make it a work which could properly be performed on the British stage" - oh, and that "he would feel he would have betrayed his office entirely if anything of that sort ever appeared in the theatre during his lifetime"."

He paused for breath and as though, Ralph thought suddenly, he was waiting for a round of applause. No doubt, when he told the story back in his accustomed haunts, he got one.

Longenhurst waved a plump white hand in an excitable gesture.

"But lots of people realised they simply couldn't stand by and let Art be ground down by these petty little bureaucrats. So they formed a network of private theatre clubs, and the cast - such dear, brave boys! - volunteered to perform for a positive pittance to show their support. Of course, everyone was in deadly fear of police raids, so the tickets had to be circulated in the most _immense_ secrecy, and we didn't confirm the venues until the last possible minute - it felt just as it must have done for those poor, misguided, gallant people in the Resistance!"

Ralph choked back a sudden impulse towards horrified, helpless laughter. He was hardly sure whether to hope that Philippe's English was too bad to pick up the reference, or to pray that he'd understood: Philippe had lost his right eye and large parts of that side of the face when the charges he'd been putting under a set of points on the line between Toulouse and Paris had detonated prematurely, and his current residence in Gibraltar was rumoured to be as a result of post war differences with a rival group of Maquis, which had made it advisable for him to leave France in a hurry for the sake of his health.

And then another thought -a fugitive memory - struck him, and, his eyes dancing (how Laurie would love the details later, when they would have leisure to discuss it) - he murmured, 

"Actually, you know, I believe a friend of mind _did_ mention in his last letter he'd seen it - Alec, you know," he added parenthetically for Laurie's benefit.

"Oh?" Longenhurst turned eagerly towards him. "And what did he think?"

The impulse to laugh got stronger. For once in their respective lives Alec and the Lord Chamberlain seemed to be uncannily similiar in their opinions, though Alec had expressed them in saltier language. Ralph could only hope that the man had been worth it - there had to have been an ulterior motive for Alec's presence at what was evidently vomit-making tosh of the worst sort.

"I'm not sure if he got much out of it, actually," Ralph said demurely.

Longenhurst looked faintly disappointed, but before he could pursue the matter Laurie said, distantly,

"I didn't know you'd had a letter from Alec."

At the breath of accusation in the tone Longenhurst's head went up; like a shark scenting the faintest wisp of blood in the water. Ralph cursed inwardly, as his mind raced. _Surely_ he'd told Laurie about Alec's letter, hadn't he? And then his stomach lurched - of course, it had come in a week ago, on the morning of the last and worst of their recent rows, and he'd planned to tell Laurie the gossip when things had calmed down a bit, and of course he'd forgotten -

And now blasted Longenhurst was sitting there, all ears, drinking it in all in -

"Didn't I tell you? It came in last Wednesday -" with any luck Laurie would pick up on the date and draw his own conclusions "- but he must have written it a couple of months ago - so far as I can tell the post had sent it round by everywhere including Wagga Wagga. You know, Longenhurst, I expect Nelson got his mail quicker than we do out here. That that gets here is late, and half of it doesn't arrive at all."

"And how is he?" Laurie's voice was politely interested; he'd seen Longenurst's sickening eagerness at the hint of a possible rift too, obviously. Ralph shrugged.

"OK, I think. Doing well professionally: he's got a new post as an anaesthetist at one of the big London hospitals." Ralph remembered something else, and grinned. "Being driven to distraction by some kid of a nurse who's contracted a major crush on him and won't take no for an answer."

And Laurie murmured something suitable, and it might all have passed over - one more minor niggle in the overall ghastliness of the evening - when Tómas appeared in the bar.

Had there been just a second's more grace before Tómas spotted him he would have made a pretext of going to the lavatory, and intercepted Tómas on the way, but before he could do so Tómas had threaded his way through the bar, and was grinning down at Ralph from his full six-foot two, his teeth startlingly white in his deeply tanned face.

Longenhurst was openly eating him alive with his eyes, from the crisply curled blue-black hair springing back from his brow down to his espadrilles (donned purely for the sake of propriety - Ralph had little doubt that Tómas's stong high-arched peasant feet were tough enough to walk across broken glass if need be).

Tómas paid him as little attention as the hunting leopard pays to the mosquito. He nodded civilly to Laurie, turned to Ralph and said, in English,

"Señor Lanyon? I have just come from the harbour. The _levanter_ has been blowing since late afternoon, and its force is increasing. You may wish to check the mooring lines on your boat."

His English was perfect, but his delivery stilted. He sounded like someone who had learned his speech by rote, to convey a quite different coded message beneath bland and conventional phrases.

It didn't help, of course, that that assessment was nothing more than the exact truth.

Ralph got to his feet. "I better had go and check, Spud. Those warps aren't the newest. Catch up with you later."

He dipped a cool nod of departure towards Longenhurst. As he rose to follow Tómas he caught Longenhurst's lingering, knowing glance after them. Laurie, he spotted, had seen the glance too, and his face was contorted in fury - and, to complete the circle, Longenhurst had seen that expression, too, and was self-evidently drawing his own conclusions.

Ralph mentally shrugged, and ducked out after Tómas into the strengthening gale lashing the harbour-side.


	3. Chapter 3

By the time Ralph had finished at the harbour the windows of the bar were dark. He made his way up the steep streets - he worried daily about the strain on Laurie's knee, but the house had fallen available so opportunely, and now he could imagine nowhere else as home - and saw that the light was spilling out through the gaps in the shutters onto the wet cobbles.

Laurie looked up as he entered, his expression reserved rather than accusing. Nevertheless, Ralph felt his voice sounded a little too hearty as he divested himself of his streaming jacket, and said,

"Sorry I had to leave you with that incredible piece of work. What can his parents have been thinking of, not to drown him in the waterbutt before his eyes opened?" 

He strode across to the sideboard and poured himself a stiff brandy, gesturing enquiringly with the decanter at Laurie, who, unexpectedly, accepted.

"He tried to persuade me to 'open my eyes' about you and Tómas."

Laurie's voice had gone toneless again. Ralph made his own voice as brisk as if he were reassuring some middy two weeks out of Dartmouth that there was nothing to fear from an Atlantic storm.

"Oh? I trust you told him Tómas has a wife and family on each side of the Pillars of Hercules?"

That got a reaction. Laurie reddened in annoyance.

"Oh? And how was I supposed to do that without being able to tell him what you were doing together?"

There wasn't, particularly, anything he could say to that. He shrugged. Laurie's colour got more intense. 

"Anyway, after I'd told him three or four times that I really didn't intend to talk about it, eventually he patted me on the hand and said that I had broken his heart, but that his illusions would have been shattered forever if my idealism hadn't matched my beauty. And then he burst into tears."

"God!" Ralph felt his face twisting with disgust. "If I'd been there - So what did you do?"

Laurie shrugged. "Well, he was pretty much stinking by then, of course. Nikos was on the point of shutting up, and he and that Negro bouncer of his - Ali Bey, you know - helped me get Longenhurst back to The Rock. Where we dumped him, and fled. Exeunt, severally, in divers directions. I just hope he didn't do anything horrific after we left him. Like make a pass at the doorman."

"The staff there are used to it," Ralph said. "Henri-Auguste claims those aren't wages he pays, they're hush money."

That brought a very faint thawing about Laurie's lips. He compressed them again with an effort and said, "Well, anyway? What did the two of you decide? I suppose you're going tomorrow, then?"

The accusing note was back in his voice. 

Ralph made himself sound as non-committal as possible. 

"Yes." The wind was banging the shutter - something was loose up there. He'd better fix it in the morning before Laurie tried doing something stupid in his absence. That leg had no business up step-ladders; he'd told him before. He nodded towards the sound. "That'll have blown through by tomorrow night, and there's no moon. Expect me to be away a couple of nights - no, make that three for luck."

"And you have to go?"

It was not, Ralph knew, a true question; rather as with a pair of chess players who have matched themselves against each other for years, and know each other's game inside out it merely represented a conventional opening move in an argument which could (and had, over the last year or so) run through any number of well-worn variants.

With the benefit of long practice, and mindful of the strain which was apparent in every muscle of Laurie's face (and no wonder; praise for his work from a moral imbecile like Longenhurst must have eaten deep into the fragile places of his soul) Ralph selected the most gentle of the available counters.

"You shouldn't fret so, Spud. I know you can't help finding three sides to any given question, but here and now, as we are, I can only see one. Less than two miles in that direction - " he gestured towards the North-West - "is one of the oldest civilisations in Europe, a place where they had piped water and street lighting, scientifically based medicine and optics when the princes of England were sleeping in draughty barns with filthy rushes on the floor. And now look at it! There are dirt-poor countries in Africa better off than Spain is today. And all to shore up the ambition of a man who let Hitler use the most beautiful cities of his own country as practice bombing ranges."

Long ago, it seemed now, Ralph had spent a weekend's precious leave in Le Havre with a chance-met Cambridge undergraduate who'd thrown up his studies on impulse, and was on his way to Spain. The boy had spent the whole weekend - when not otherwise occupied - trying to persuade Ralph to desert his ship and join the International Brigade with him. And Ralph had laughed, and wondered once again at the perverse human facility for throwing away all the shining gifts placed in easy reach in front of one in favour of chasing some will-o'-the wisp on the edge of vision; almost impossible to catch and bound to disappoint if you succeeded.

But then Ralph had seen the devastating effects of the bombardments on the great ports of Spain, and, later, the corrosive day-to-day hopelessness of living under a dictator's iron hand, and the dictates of a mediaeval and rigidly authoritarian Church.

He wondered, briefly, if the young man - what had his name been? - would be touched to think that a decade later his words had born fruit. If he'd survived, of course.

Laurie shrugged, his tone dismissive.

"So - to keep the lamp of civilisation alive - you ship them tobacco and french letters?"

Ralph tried not to let his anger colour his voice; Laurie had had a far worse day than he, and if Laurie thought he'd managed to conceal that the leg was obviously giving him gip then he didn't know him as well as he thought he did.

"I don't run anything I'm ashamed of. There are cargoes I've shifted on Merchant Marine boats I've felt a damn sight less clean about being involved with. I've spent all my adult life getting cargo from A to B. It's what I do. And, Spud, that's all we're talking about. And the fact that the Generalissimo isn't seeing a penny of duty on any of it makes me happier than you can possibly imagine."

The air of wounded disillusionment which hung about Laurie's lips deepened.

"And you don't think that a decorated war hero should aim a bit higher?"

Ralph's voice came out terser than he'd meant.

"Actually, from where I was standing at the time, 90% of the Battle of the Atlantic was an exercise in getting groceries from one place to another in the teeth of opposition, too."

Laurie made a small noise of exasperation.

"Oh, drop the false modesty! No-one else would compare two and a half years in corvettes to delivering groceries."

Ralph exhaled. He considered telling Laurie that he hadn't intended it as a comparison, simply a description, but he couldn't think of a way of expressing that without its sounding snotty. Those who hadn't been on the Atlantic convoys - even the best of them - never really got the point. But you only had to see how quickly the decencies and niceties that one took for granted deteriorated beyond human comprehension when supply lines failed, to realise that "grocery delivery" was a damn sight more elevated a calling - damn near spiritual, in some circumstances - than anything a pampered ass like Longenhurst - who no doubt had sat out the war in a reserved occupation complaining about the scanty monotony of the food on his plate, without ever sparing a thought for those who had got it there - had ever managed to contribute to the sum of human happiness or the preservation of civilisation.

Anyway, the reference to the war had diverted Laurie onto another tack.

"I only wish you'd taken the full commission they'd offered you at the end of the war."

This, too, was an old argument. 

"What? And driven a desk in Pompey for the rest of my career in the Navy?"

Something else he recollected from the mix of gossip and news of old friends in Alec's letter prompted him to add,

"However short that might have been, these days."

Laurie looked sharply across at him.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Ralph shrugged. "It wasn't just missing fingers the Navy was prepared to turn a blind eye to when they were desperate for commanders. Awkward questions somehow never got asked. But things are coming more to a point these days. It wouldn't take much. A word in the wrong ear. Someone commenting that he hadn't seen me bring anyone to the Victory anniversary ball or any other official gala day, ever. Or something being picked up on one of those random background checks the Yanks are insisting on, if you're doing anything remotely hush-hush with their people."

Laurie nodded, unhappily, acknowledging the point. And then he got round to what Ralph had known he was driving towards all along.

"If they catch you, you could end up being shot."

"I doubt it. Smuggling in these parts has been part of the fabric for hundreds of years. Have you ever read the Treaty of Utrecht? The Guardia Civil are doing too well out of bribes to start turning it into a blood sport this late in the day. The worst that's likely to happen if they catch us is that we'll lose the launch, and we'll have to bribe our way out of jail."

Actually, given what he and Tómas had discussed about their cargo this time, that was not strictly true. But there was no point in worrying Spud, and Ralph had no intention of getting caught, in any event.

Unhappily, Laurie nodded. By way of changing the subject, he recounted some absurdity of literary London which Longenhurst had shared after Ralph's departure. Ralph, playing along, topped up their glasses again, and told him the rest of Alec's gossip. Under the yellow of the lamplight the evening petered out in the sleepy warmth of settled companionship.


	4. Chapter 4

Ralph came up on deck fully prepared to give their passenger the tongue-lashing he deserved: though yesterday's _levanter_ had blown through it had left its legacy in the form of a steep, tumbling, confused sea. Nor - though the tide was running with them, and the lethal race would not form until it turned - were the overfalls off Europa Point anything to play games with in these conditions. If it wasn't that the inshore passage was less open to the scrutiny of prying eyes they'd have been standing four or five miles out to sea by now.

As if to emphasise the point the sole of Ralph's sea-boot skidded a little under him. He swore under his breath. The passenger's shoes - originally craftsman-made to the standards appropriate for a distinguished professor of philosophy, formerly of the University of Salamanca, then self-evidently hoarded, and mended and resoled for years more than their owner could possibly have imagined would be necessary when they were newly bought - would have all the gripping power of polished glass on the steel deck, awash with the spray kicked up by their rapid passage. If their passenger were to go over the side now, God help him in this sea and in the darkness of the new moon.

But the man's attitude as he stood gripping the launch's rail, looking back at the almost invisible bulk of the land behind them, caused the words Ralph had been planning to utter to die unborn on his lips. Being forced to choose between exile or death must be bad enough for anyone, and the man was, after all, nearing seventy. He had lost everything over the last few years: family, position, an audience for his writings, and his chances of ever seeing his homeland again must be scanty.

He pitched his voice to carry, and said, in Spanish, "Don Miguel! I am sorry, but I must ask you to come below at once. You cannot safely remain on deck in these conditions."

Don Miguel Muños Guittierez turned, moving rather like a sleepwalker. Ralph put out a hand to steady his steps, and held the heavy door open for him. As he passed through he looked back over the port quarter to Spain for one last time, and murmured something: not, this time, in Spanish.

Ralph found himself automatically translating the familiar words in his head.

_But if you go forth, returning evil for evil and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy, for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us. Listen, then, to us and not to Krito._

As easily as though he were continuing a conversation which had been going on for some time, Ralph said, "But perhaps, if it had been the Thirty not the Demos who had condemned him, Socrates might have answered Krito differently? He could hardly say that he had made any covenants with the tyrants who usurped the Government of Athens, or that he had voluntarily chosen to live under their laws without compulsion or deception."

The Professor turned sharply towards him. He spread his hands apologetically.

"Forgive me, señor. I am intruding on your thoughts."

Guittierez shook his head. "No, on the contrary. It is I who should ask for forgiveness. It occurs to me that I have been a most awkward passenger, and that when the risks you are taking for me are not trivial. Like the Thirty, the present Government of my country is not gentle with those who defy its dictates. But you are not - if you will excuse my saying so - the sort of man I had expected to be engaged in business of this type."

There was nothing Ralph could reasonably say to that. He did his best.

"Well," he said, "it's something that's been said to me before. Usually accompanied with an earnest request that I stop." And he grinned.

Guittierez inclined his head gravely, but there was a hint of laughter, too, about the finely carved lips in the austere patrician face.

"For my part, I am glad that that request has - to date - been declined."

The old man was looking weary, though, and more than a little nauseated. Ralph showed him to a bunk, fastened his lee-cloth for him, and went to relieve Tómas at the helm. It was a long haul to Oran, even at the speeds the launch could achieve, and he foresaw there would be little time spare to discuss the dialogues of Plato. But the seas, away from the influence of the Strait, were already beginning to calm, and the stars were coming out: the thick-sprinkled broken-glass glitter one only saw on moonless nights well out from land. He was humming from sheer-lightheartedness as he took the wheel.

Two days later as he climbed the hill from Gilbraltar harbour Ralph still felt like humming. Guittierez had been safely consigned to the plane to Paris (by now those who had funded his flight into exile would no doubt already have received him with open arms). Financially the trip had been more than worth it: he was, by now, appreciably nearer the day when he'd be able to wrest himself free of ship-owners and their whims forever. There was much one could do, in this post-War world, plenty of chances to get in on the ground floor. All it needed was capital. And the French - even in their North African outposts - still knew how to live. His duffle bag was packed with tangible evidence of that.

So early in the morning there was nothing more than the odd cat stirring in the streets. The sky had a pale pearly sheen; the day would be hot, then. Perhaps he and Laurie would go swimming, later.

Ralph turned the corner which led towards his street and almost stumbled over someone standing there peering helplessly at the street sign; a man, too heavily dressed for the weather, in a thick well-worn British overcoat, a battered suitcase resting against his legs.

He looked up.

"Excuse me? Do you by any chance speak English? Can you tell me -" and then his voice changed, the polite nothingness to a chance-met stranger shattering, turning into something sharper, more desperate. "Oh, thank God. It is you."

Ralph managed to get his arm out just in time to catch him as Alec, the effort of holding himself together suddenly becoming impossible, crumpled muzzily where he stood.


	5. Chapter 5

Ralph half-helped, half-carried Alec the remaining dozen yards to his front door, fumbling awkwardly for his latchkey as he did so. Before he could produce it the door opened inwards. Laurie must have seen them from his study window. His voice was tight with anger and with what Ralph realised, with a swift stab of contrition, was pent-up worry.

"Where the hell have you been? You said three nights at the outside! I've had Annunciata weeping all over the kitchen and screeching that Franco must be torturing you and Tómas with his own bare hands since the day before yesterday."

"Oh, Christ! She isn't still here, is she?"

Laurie gave a sharp, negativing shake of his head. His mouth was opening to ask the next obvious question when Alec, who had been virtually comatose for the last yard or so, stirred against Ralph's shoulder, and turned his head up and towards Laurie.

Laurie's eyes widened as he recognised Alec.

"I didn't realise that was why you'd - Look, we'd better get indoors, hadn't we?"

Ralph nodded. Sorting out the misunderstanding about what his trip had really been about could wait. None of this - assuming he had read Alec's desperate, hunted expression correctly - was anything that it was sensible to discuss in the street. 

Once they were in the living room Alec slumped in an attitude of exhaustion into the depths of the sofa. Ralph said,

"I expect you'd appreciate a bath, wouldn't you? I don't suppose the boiler's lit yet, but if we light it now there should be plenty of hot water by the time you've finished breakfast."

Alec half-raised his head.

"Save water, bath with a friend," he intoned dispassionately, in heavy, official tones. "Must go down in history as the only sensible advice any Government department ever gave."

Laurie looked affronted for a moment, and then he must have recognised in Alec's voice something of that defiant, bitter heroism that comes not from victory but from the kind of defeat that rings longer down the annals of history than victory ever should or will: _Go tell the Spartans_ -

Laurie nodded gravely. "Never heard better myself. I'll put the kettle on while I'm sorting the boiler."

He vanished to put that into effect. Alec looked at Ralph with an air of exhausted apology.

"Sorry. My tact seems to have got itself left in England with the rest of my belongings. I shouldn't have forced myself on you. I should have realised it might be awkward in the circs."

His answer was automatic; he had uttered it even before being conscious of wondering what to say.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous, my dear. Where else could you think of coming but to me, if you're in any sort of jam?"

The resounding silence before Alec responded told him much, but when after a carefully judged pause Ralph looked up the doorway between the living room and hallway was empty. 

Ralph exhaled. "Anyway, I'd better go and make up a bed for you."

By the time he had returned from putting fresh sheets on the bed in what for the benefit of Maria, who cleaned for them, was always carefully referred to as "Laurie's room" Alec had revived enough to decamp from the sofa through into the sunlit kitchen. Laurie and he were conversing with a kind of distant, brittle courtesy, like people who meet at a party and discover that they have either too much or too little in common to make for easy conversation.

The kettle, fortunately, was singing happily on the stove. Ralph took possession of it and brewed coffee with the practised efficiency that came of having done it at all sorts of angles and in frighteningly cramped conditions. He'd got a chance to see Alec properly in good light, and made his own assessment of that greyish skin, febrile manner and twitchy hands.

There was a crock of Atlas mountain honey in his duffle bag, black and thick as molasses and fragrant with the scent of the herbs that grew on the sparse soil of the uplands. Ralph pulled it out, stirred a couple of dripping spoonfuls into the coffee jug, and followed it with a heavy slug from the bottle of coarse Spanish brandy which stood on a shelf next to the stove.

"Here," he said, pouring from the jug into a mug, and pushing it across to Alec. "Have a _carajillo_. The Spanish workman's staple pick-me-up. One of the better contributions made by the Spanish to civilisation."

He had not underestimated its effectiveness as a reviver. After the first three gulps the colour started to return to Alec's face; he sat more upright, and there was a hint of the old sardonic humour about his narrow-featured face.

"Well," he said, "I suppose I owe you both an explanation."

Whatever the unresolved tensions of the morning, Laurie had not lost the absent, instinctive generosity of spirit which Ralph had seen and loved in him from the first. He shook his head.

"Not if you don't want to. It's entirely your choice. You're welcome to stay here as long as you like, of course."

Alec's expression changed, lightened, became more open. He turned a little towards Laurie.

"Well, that wouldn't be fair, either. I shouldn't think the Authorities would be minded to make that big an effort, you understand, but it is British territory, still, and it's only fair to let you two know what you might be letting yourselves in for."

"The Authorities?"

Alec shrugged. " _Behind was dock and Dartmoor, ahead lay Callao._ Or, to quote another great thinker, 'True patriots we, for be it understood, we left our country for our country's good' - Did you get the letter where I told you about Nurse Urquhart?"

Ralph nodded. "Only last week, though. I take it she was something of a trial."

There was something slightly grim about the set of Alec's lips, and his tone was clinically detached.

"A touch of hyperthyroidism and a strong streak of repressed nymphomania, manifesting itself as excessive religious fevour and unbalanced adolescent emotionalism."

Laurie winced, sympathetically, but Ralph noted with a touch of amusement that he also had the familiar faintly withdrawn expression that suggested he was hoping to remember the description until he could note it down for future reference.

"People drew conclusions from your avoiding her?" he suggested delicately.

Alec grinned. "I can assure you, if avoiding Nurse Urquhart's attentions were the test, every doctor in the hospital would have qualified as queer. No; my mistake was to underestimate just how persistent these demented females can get."

His hand sketched a gesture. "I'd fallen on my feet as far as digs went. God knows how, I'd found a couple of rooms in one of those big mid-nineteenth century terraced houses, all peeling stucco and impossible to heat, of course, but less than ten minutes from the hospital with a landlord who didn't care what one got up to provided the cops didn't call and you delivered your rent dead on the nail."

He took a swig of _carajillo_.

"Anyway, I'd got one or two irons in the fire - nothing serious. No drama - well, apart from the tear-stained little notes from Nurse Urquhart I kept finding in unexpected places."

Yes; the _carajillo_ was definitely doing him good. 

"Apart from anything else the switch to doing dopes had left me with a lot of reading to catch up on. And - what day is it again? Thursday? Well, a week yesterday, then, I was curled up under an eiderdown on the sofa doing precisely that when there was the most appalling commotion outside."

Ralph topped up the mug. Alec nodded gratefully.

"I guessed immediately that it was Phil. He's an actor - I doubt you'd know him. I'd come across him at this appalling play in a cellar somewhere - everyone was cooing over how wonderfully daring it was, and all I could think of was getting out and finding a drink to get the taste out of my mouth. Picture my surprise when the next man at the bar turned out to be the chap who'd played the lead, who'd apparently had the same idea. And that was Phil. Of course, you know actors. Good fun, but unbelievably indiscreet, so I wasn't best pleased about him kicking up a racket in the street outside my digs, especially since it was clear he was pretty well lit up. So I shoved up the window and told him to put a sock in it or I'd shut him up myself, and he looked up to see where I was. Which was when he tripped over his own feet and fell the best part of ten feet off the top step down into the area."

Laurie looked horrified.

"And that killed him?"

Alec raised his eyebrows. His expression was indecipherable, but his tone remained level.

"Well, no. The luck of drunks, madmen - and actors. Barring the odd bruise he was as right as rain. He'd been fairly relaxed in the first place, given the amount he'd had to drink, and he landed on something soft. And I suppose they teach them how to fall properly at drama school."

Ralph, whose imagination had taken the same leaps as Laurie's, and had seen the shadow of a noose over Alec's head, heaved a sigh of relief. 

"Well, thank God for that!" 

Alec coughed. "Well, not entirely. You see, the something soft he landed on happened to be Nurse Urquhart."

"What?"

"She'd been lurking down in the area, for reasons best known to herself. Who knows what was going through what passed for her mind? Anyway, she bundled out of there shrieking blue murder in all directions, and I bolted down expecting to find Phil with a broken neck, but, as I say, he'd come out of it much better than he deserved to do. So I supplied arnica and the benefit of my opinion and - the evening ended pretty much as you might expect."

Though Alec's tone never lost its casual nonchalance his hands were gripped so tightly around his mug that the knuckles were white. With some vague notion of easing the tension Ralph started to unload the contents of his duffle onto the kitchen table. Alec's eyes widened.

"Good heavens," he observed with an air of cool detachment, "I don't think I've ever seen so many eggs together in one place since before the fall of Singapore. What are you proposing to do with them?"

"Make omelettes," Ralph said. "Goodness only knows when you last had a proper meal."

"You know, I'm not at all sure I can remember?" Alec frowned, slightly, as though trying to dredge up a not-particularly significant fact from the depths and then flipped his hand as though to signify, no matter. He continued, "Anyway, that was that. Until two days later when I got called into the Senior Consultant's office. Apparently he'd had an anonymous letter."

Although he'd adapted, over the years, to the damage to his hand, Ralph suddenly found what should have been the simple task of transferring half a dozen eggs into a bowl trickier than he'd expected. It was a relief, in a way: it gave him a reason not to look up and see the expression on Alec's face. The faint break in his voice had told him too much. Ralph, too, could remember a summons from Higher Authority that had left his world in tatters.

"From her, I suppose?" Laurie's question hit exactly the right note of detached concern. His hand reached out, checking an escaping egg just before it was about to roll off the table. "Should I take over on the omelette front?"

Ralph surrendered the bowl and the eggs without comment, and looked up. Alec had recovered himself; his face was utterly non-committal.

"Well, who else? But that wasn't really the issue. Lyall-Owens was pretty decent about it. It wasn't the first case he'd seen of a nurse who'd thought she'd been jilted by some doctor or other trying to wreck his career through spite. And Lyall-Owens may be an Edwardian fossil, but there's a sort of old-fashioned decency that comes with that, too. He looked as if he wanted to put on surgical gloves and use forceps before he could bear to touch her letter. If it had been up to him, he'd have dropped it in the fire and I'd have heard nothing more about it."

The question was, after all, obvious. "And it wasn't up to him?"

Alec shrugged. "A carbon copy had been sent to the Matron, I gather. She wasn't going to stand for any breath of scandal about her nice clean hospital. I had to come up with a full, utterly innocent explanation or - "

The gesture with his side-on hand was unequivocal. Ralph felt a sick stab deep inside him. Knowing what he knew of Alec's stubborn integrity, there was only one place this could end.

 

"Even then, Lyall-Owens was giving me every opportunity not to tell him anything he didn't want to hear. But - well, you know how I feel about that sort of thing. I didn't think I could give him any form of assurance that would satisfy the hospital authorities and still find myself worth living with. And in the end I told him that."

"How did he take it?"

Alec shrugged. "He argued. Told me nothing in anyone's personal life was worth losing the opportunities medicine offered a young man with talent, especially not at this time. Told me that all I had to do was keep my nose clean, allow myself to be seen taking "some suitable gel" to the pictures on a couple of occasions and it could all blow over, and no harm to anyone's conscience. He ended up telling me to take a couple of days leave and not say a word to anyone about this business, and he'd go in to bat for me with the hospital authorities. He was being so damned decent the least I thought I could do was tell him I'd think it over."

Alec looked out of the kitchen window, but not as though he was seeing anything that anyone else could see.

"But then matters were taken out of Lyall-Owens's hands altogether."

Alec took a sip of his now cooling _carajillo_. His voice sounded as though it was coming from a very long way away.

"You see, next morning the laundry maid found Nurse Urquhart in the laundry closet when she came on duty." He exhaled, and there was a world of bitterness in the sound. "Though as neither the cord nor the light-fitting she'd chosen for the job were up to her weight, actually she survived the experience with nothing worse than concussion and a badly wrenched neck."

His expression was redolent with disgust and contempt; of course, her suicide attempt would have struck a peculiar resonance with him. Laurie, busy making omelettes, looked up.

"But surely no-one in their senses could have blamed you?"

Alec looked across at him directly. "You know, especially since the War, I'm really not at all sure any of us are in our senses any more. Take Hiroshima. When a whole city can be vapourised in an eye-blink, does it make sense for a surgical team to take several hours to operate on a middle-aged housewife for cancer, when in all probability we're prolonging - for five years at the utmost - a life of no global significance, no economic productivity, no relevance really to anyone except her immediate family?"

"But you still do it," Ralph said.

" _Did_ it, in my particular case. Lyell-Owens got on the phone to me as soon as they found her - I said he'd been most extraordinarily decent about the whole thing. Let me know she'd left notes for everyone she could think of, in anticipation of a successful outcome. And that her parents were hot-footing it down from Litchfield at that very moment, to bring down the wrath of the Law on the evil pervert who drove their darling to the very brink of the abyss. Left it to me to use the information as I thought fit."

Alec shivered, though the morning was living up to its early promise of heat.

"God! Well, you can imagine how I felt. I don't have a much time for the sort of people who pull off stunts like that as a general rule, specially if they end up creating a bigger mess than the one they were running away from in the first place, but if I ever get driven in that direction, I hope at least I'll have the basic human decency to do the job properly without fuss first go, and not leave vast screeds of whining self-justification to poison the lives of everyone I ever claimed to have any affection for."

There was a faint sound, only perceptible on the very edge of hearing. Laurie, surprised by Ralph's sudden turn of the head in his direction, flushed red, and made something of a business of retrieving large quantities of shell which had suddenly slipped from his fingers into the egg bowl.

And in that split second Ralph felt an icy hand clench around his guts, as something which had been for years an evanescent suspicion on the edge of reason was made suddenly concrete.

_He did read your letter before you got back to the flat that night. He knows exactly why you burnt your diaries. He's always known. And -he's never told you he knows ._

 

That night - what had nearly been - had been a sore place in memory ever since, barely scabbed, too sensitive to go near, even now. Ralph's only comfort - until now - was that it was a shame known only to himself.

He had been wrong about that, it seemed.

He kept up a polite fiction of interest in the rest of Alec's account of grabbing what little ready money he could scrape together, throwing his things together, and making his way first to Charing Cross and the boat-train, and then slowly, tortuously, by train - cheapest seats which, more often than not, had meant standing in corridors or cramped on wood slats - down through France and Spain in the hope of finding refuge.

But behind it and the civil injections and questions manners demanded Ralph's mind raced, and he seemed to hear a mocking, high sound, like the first shifting of timber as the house built upon sand begins to flex and sway before the rising wind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Revised chapter to correct an accidental omission.


	6. Chapter 6

Ralph thought it was an ironic genuflection of fate in his direction that his by now ritual visit to the shipping office should, on that morning of all mornings, have given him the news for which he had been hoping during the last nine months.

The clerk's overpowering enthusiasm about the successful placing of one R.R Lanyon in the position of first mate in a mixed cargo carrier registered out of Seattle would, in other circumstances, have been almost comic.

Despite his other concerns and the oppressive heat of the day Ralph managed to summon up a decent degree of enthusiasm for the efforts the clerk might have gone to in order to achieve this particular miracle. 

Actually, once it came down to the technical detail of discussing the requirements of the berth, and the no less important but distinctly non-technical gossip about why, possibly, the previous first officer might have found his berth abruptly removed from beneath him, he found his feigned attention being replaced by genuine interest, and, imperceptibly, by enthusiasm. In fact, he found himself sufficiently absorbed to spend the best part of two hours in the drab little office, not even noticing the bluebottles, trapped and buzzing endlessly against the tiny, grimy window.

By the time he got back to the house he was well through the exercise of working out what he had that he could take, what would need to be replaced, what he needed by hook or by crook to obtain by the day after tomorrow, and what he would have to make shift to do without until they made landfall in some suitably accomodating port.

Which left him, fortunately, very little time in which he could fret about how matters might be left on shore during his absence (four months at best, and very likely six) given the morning's enlightenment.

He was not the sort of man to feel relief that he could, with all credit and little trouble to himself, effortlessly avoid all that sort of thing for an indefinite period. It would have to be faced before he left. One of the lessons he had absorbed from what at the time he had thought of as an inordinately silly play, only redeemed (personal issues aside) by its spectacular set pieces from an unconscionable amount of shilly-shallying, was that "Conscience doth make cowards of us all". It was not a philosophy he found that he was prepared to live with.

At least, not in the long or even the medium term. Nevertheless, when he got back to the house to find Alec and Laurie just roused from a long, deep siesta, and bumbling around in the drugged heat of late afternoon, he put the revelations of the morning squarely on one side, and proposed a swim.

A couple of hours later the launch was bobbing at anchor in one of the coves out towards Cabo Trafalgar, with an ingenious arrangement of trailed dinghy and swimming steps affording even Laurie full access in and out of the water.

Alec lay supine across the hot steel of the deck, drinking in the sun, a hand half-shading his eyes.

"Thanks. And sorry. You were right all along, you know. I was foolish to imagine things might be different."

There was little Ralph could say. "At least Lyall-Owens tried. I feel better for knowing that."

He retrieved one of the bottles of pilsner which had been chilling in a bucket of sea-water, and passed it across to Alec.

Alec half propped himself up on one elbow, "True. Of course. Do you know, he was still trying to propagate his own ideas of Edwardian decency to the last? He said, 'Deacon!' Like that, of course, as though it mattered, 'Deacon! There was, in my youth, a very good sort of man. The rumour was that they were women haters, and I daresay they were. Nevertheless, they did very well in theatre. No distractions, Deacon! Pity times have changed, great pity.'"

Ralph barked a laugh. "Any ideas what you might be going to do now?"

"You're very welcome to stay as long as you like, of course," Laurie added, slightly formally. Alec acknowleged the offer with a quick, charming smile, like the sun briefly appearing from behind clouds,

"Thanks. But truly I am only a bird of passage here; just until I can find something to do with the rest of my life. Tell me, what prospects do you see? I don't suppose your new ship has a berth for a ship's doctor, Ralph?"

"That, I'm afraid, would be already filled. By me," Ralph said. "Along with all the other lots in life that fall upon the poor bloody first officer. And don't look at me like that, Alec; we've had it out before, and in point of fact I agree with you. Every time one of the matelots came to me with collywobbles when I've been stuck with that job I found myself praying it wasn't appendicitis, and that I would guess near enough right not to end up having to wrap him in canvas and take the last stitch through his top lip. But I'm not responsible for where the owners choose to cut corners; at least, not as yet. Your best chance would be one of the lines that take passengers; they can't afford to take as many risks with them."

Alec took this in with a faint frown, as though, Ralph though suddenly, the sudden narrowing of his options had acquired a visceral rather than an academic reality. He felt a sudden spiking of anger at the sheer waste of things; all Alec's trained intelligence, his skill and dedication, his years of experience, accounted as nothing against the single psychological quirk which, in the other pan of the scales, weighed down so heavily under the pressing finger of the world's opinion.

Alec must have seen something of this in his face, or perhaps his own thoughts had taken him to the same place, because his voice had acquired a veneer of nonchalence over a bitter undertone.

"Of course, given that I've been criminalised already, perhaps I should embrace my destiny fully. After all, my skills could be very profitable in the right circles." He pitched his voice to a high parody of debutante tones. " 'My dear, you don't need to worry about a thing. I know of the most marvellous man - completely professional and discreet - the girls in our set completely swear by him. All the arrangements handled with the strictest confidence, no-one need suspect anything."

Laurie looked up, his face open in shock. 

"You can't be serious. Surely you'd never really do it?"

Alec shrugged, the set of his mouth bitter.

"When you've seen what I've seen in theatre: us trying - and mostly failing - to repair the messes left by botched jobs perpetrated on desperate women perhaps it'd be more humane and moral to offer them cleanly and safely what they'll snatch from dirty needles in back alleys if we don't."

Abruptly, Laurie rolled over and scrambled somehow to his feet, moving stiffly and silently to the side of the boat and dropping into the water. Alec looked after him with surprise.

"Well. I have to say that I thought I was in about the last company where I'd have expected a comment along those lines to hit a raw nerve."

Ralph paused. "I take you didn't know about his mother?"

A questioning eyebrow signalled "Go on." About 20 yards away from the boat Ralph could see Laurie striking out as though determined to make it to Spain, slicing through the waves with the ugly but effective side-stroke which he had developed to compensate for his leg. He shook his head thoughtfully.

"It was a couple of years ago, I suppose. She started to miscarry late on - either they didn't appreciate what was happening in time, or they panicked - delays getting to hospital - no-one with petrol - ambulances all elsewhere - you know the sort of thing. Died on the operating table. We never got the details straight. I was at sea, and they didn't manage to get a message through to Laurie - or at least, he couldn't get away from the Ministry - until after it was over."

"A miscarriage? But she must have been -"

"Forty-eight or so. Yes."

Alec whistled. "Bit of a shock for her to realise she was pregnant in the first place, I should imagine." He, too, looked thoughtfully out towards the sandy-dark head bobbing among the waves. His voice changed. "Bit of a shock for everyone, I imagine."

Ralph wasn't going to argue with that one. Certain phrases from Laurie's letters written in the fraught weeks which led up to the final tragedy were forever burnt upon his mind. Not that that sort of thing was anyone's business but their own. He made an impatient gesture.

"Well, that isn't the point. For some reason rumours started to run wildfire in the village - you know how poisonous these little places can get - to the effect that 'the Vicar's wife took something to bring it off and it killed her' -"

Alec snorted. "Oh, I can bet you anything you like where that one came from. Natural village bitchery aside, we've had this one time and again." 

He reached for another bottle of pilsener. 

"Understandable, I suppose. We're trained to use technical language, to describe conditions precisely. Unfortunately nine out of ten lay people will not grasp that "spontaneous abortion" is just medico-speak for a perfectly natural miscarriage. I've seen outraged husbands threaten to kill nurses for slandering their wives. These days, I always make a point of warning anyone who might come into contact with the relatives -"

He shut up, abruptly. Ralph, feeling as though he was speaking a slightly too fast to cover up a pause which had threatened to become prolonged, said,

"Well, however it arose it put the Rev. in an awkward spot. Desperate to cause a diversion at all costs, I suppose. And fortunately the Bishop of Bath and Wells had just given him a golden opportunity. Laurie's book had been out some time by then, of course, but the sensation didn't really start until the Bish decided to denounce it as 'more dangerous to the youth of today than the Atomic bomb.' Good for sales, of course."

Alec sat up. His dark eyes were narrow with a suppressed, intense emotion. "Good God. Where have these people been? So describing what a crisis of conscience feels like from the inside becomes too immoral to talk about, does it?"

There was nothing, really, to say about that. He had been frightened on first being given one of the proofs of Laurie's book that he might not be able to praise it, and that not only would insincere enthusiasm have stuck in his throat as a sin against the Good, but that Laurie would have known, instantly, that he was lying. But instead the inarticulacy of his response had come because he was afraid that any attempt to put into words how far certain passages had moved him would sound trite and fatuous. Rather belatedly, it occurred to him that he had perhaps taken it on trust that Laurie knew the difference, rather than made sure it was so. But certainly his anger at the wilful blindness of the imbecilic prelate had been something he'd been able to find words for; something, in fact, that a fifteen-year career at sea had uniquely shaped his vocabulary to express.

Alec made a sound of the profoundest disgust.

"I see. A godsend for the widower. So where did he take it?"

Ralph shrugged. "Where you'd expect, of course. I'm told the sermon was very moving. And unequivocal." 

"God, what a bloody mess." Alec looked over towards the African shore, shimmering in the heat haze. "And you came out here not long after?"

Ralph nodded.

"As soon as I got demobbed. It turned out - one thing that Straike couldn't have banked on - that most of Laurie's mother's money came from a life-interest in her father's estate. On her death it reverted to her children - or child, as it turned out, of course. The income's enough for him to live on abroad, if not in England. Gives him the chance to write full-time, rather than in odd snatched minutes fitted around a day job, like the first one, after all."

"Mm. I see." Alec stared out to sea for a little longer, and then turned to face him, the ghost of his normal charming smile on his lips.

"You'll never guess who I met in the hospital, about six months ago. Remember Pinky Fordyce?"

Glad to have the chance to move onto less perilous ground, Ralph cast his mind back.

"No - oh, yes - of course! Part of Smithers's crowd, yes? Nice bloke. What was he in hospital for? Nothing serious, I hope." Some sort of shadow crossed Alec's face and, abruptly, Ralph recollected himself. "Oh, I forgot. Don't say if it's breaching any confidences."

Alec smiled. "Hardly. He wasn't one of my patients. I used to go over and chat to him - for all intents and purposes I was the only person in the place who talked his language."

Ralph nodded, trying to recreate Pinky's round, school-boy pink features in his head. They kept dissolving into a blur, vaguely topping an impression of battledress. He gestured to Alec to continue.

"He'd been captured by the Japs in Burma; had a rough time in a prison camp. Once they got him out he started having black-outs. After his last episode he woke up in hospital and found he'd punched his hand clean through a shop window. Officially, we were treating the mess he'd made of the arteries and tendons. Obviously, we were also rather interested in finding out what was behind it, in case he came round from his next black-out having used someone's face as the punching bag, not a window. Or worse. And Pinky didn't fancy fetching up in Broadmoor or the morgue, so he was quite happy to co-operate. So in between operations they were trooping him off to a succession of psychiatrists, which I think was leaving him rather bemused. 'You know,' he said to me once, 'those chaps are all the same. Once they find out a man's queer they think they've hit the answer to everything. I've told them that I was just as queer before I went to Burma, but I never had blackouts then. But will they listen?' But eventually they did find someone who was able to get beyond that, and Pinky was doing much better when I had to leave. Left me feeling a lot less lukewarm about the value of the discipline than I had before. Though I still don't doubt there's a lot of quackery in it. Did you ever think of psychoanalysis at all?"

"Who, me?" His face must have spoken volumes. Alec's mouth twisted wryly.

"Well, it's not that much of a strange question. Plenty of our fraternity have; specially if their parents find out about their being queer. Mostly, it's the parents who insist."

"God! It's clear you never met my mother. I don't know what she'd find more shaming; having a queer son or one who'd been treated for anything "mental". Anyway, what's the point? Most of the types who go in for it just want their pathetic little neuroses stroked and coddled. Look, can you picture me lying for hours on a couch talking tripe and being told that all my problems are because I wanted to murder my father and marry my mother, or is it the other way round?"

Alec laughed softly. "My dear, you know perfectly well that your uncouth merchant skipper pose doesn't wash with me. Save it for the jewels of the London literary scene - oh, yes; Laurie told me about Longenhurst. He told me quite a lot, actually. One way and another."

And he looked out again towards the dark speck of the head bobbing amid the waves, with, Ralph fancied, a faintly worried air. Alec, of course, always had been a worrier, even in cases like this where was quite plainly no need for it. Laurie had turned to swim back towards the launch now anyway, and, awkward as his leg made him appear, he was more than equal to coping with the deep water and unpredictable currents that he found himself in.


	7. Chapter 7

It was generally Ralph's habit to drop by the Post Office at least twice a week to collect their letters. Most of their mail arrived Poste Restante; at first they had been moving about between lodgings which had, for various reasons, proved unsuitable, and even once they had settled into the house they had been chary of giving out their address too widely.

The wind had risen again, and an unseasonable fine rain was being driven in brush-strokes across the streets. The Rock, it seemed, was determined to bid him a suitably damp farewell. Still, as he was due on board by mid-morning tomorrow, this was not an errand he could put off to a more congenial occasion. Ralph turned up the collar of his light mackintosh and made the most of his long stride.

The small airmailed package with the French stamps and the spiky, foreign handwriting was something of a mystery. He dropped it into his pocket for later consideration, having urgent business at a chandlers down by the docks, and forgot all about it for some hours.

He was reminded of it only when that evening he was rummaging through his raincoat pocket for his lighter (everyone else's having apparently gone missing) and found his hand hitting the unfamiliar shape. He pulled it out, looking puzzled, and, compelled by long habit, painstakingly undid the complex knots in the string which bound the parcel together.

When the slender calf-bound volume dropped into his hand Ralph felt a sudden shock; not precisely of surprise, but of recognition. He did not need to turn to the inscription (lovingly calligraphed in a spidery, archaic script) to know who had sent it or what it represented: the only possible gesture delicate enough for one gentleman to indicate inexpressible obligation to another in his own rank in life.

"'A commentary upon certain dialogues of Plato'? " Alec enquired, craning his head and translating the title without difficulty. "Have you decided to find consolations in philosophy in your old age?"

Laurie, his head bent over a newspaper on the other side of the room, brought his head up sharply.

"No. It's a present."

The repressiveness in Ralph's tone conveyed - he realised a split second too late - a defensiveness he had been far from intending. Conscious of perilous ambiguity he proffered the book, open at the autographed flyleaf for Alec's inspection; rather, he thought ruefully, with a touch of the same ostentatious parade of innocence with which the stage conjuror asks an audience member to verify that the billiard balls are solid, and the cups without false bottoms.

Alec's brows shot up.

"You do move in exalted circles. Don Miguel Muños Guittierez? I saw something about him in _Le Monde_ when I was coming down through France. I gather the French intelligentsia were congratulating themselves mightily on having snatched him out of Spain an inch ahead of one of the Generalissimo's re-education squads. How did you come to earn his -"

Alec looked over the fine thin black ink of the inscription on the title-page again, and puzzled a little at the foreign phrasing.

"'Perpetual gratitude'?"

Vividly, Ralph was reminded of exactly why the maximum time he and Alec could live harmoniously under one roof had been demonstrated - by actual experiment - to be three weeks. No-one could be kinder, or more perceptive than Alec, not even Laurie, who possessed the gift of a breathtaking insight at times. Equally, no-one could be less relied on than Alec to take a hint that a subject did not bear further worrying at if he did not choose to do so. Laurie, shielded by his paper, was already looking as though he had withdrawn himself deliberately from the dust and sweat of an uncongenial arena. Ralph cursed inwardly. Today of all days! And with that other matter still lying - an unspoken lead weight - between them. Ralph assumed his best bridge-officer's voice.

"If you want to know, he needed a lift in a hurry and I was - fortunately - in a position to offer one."

Alec's face changed: reacting more to the undisguised edge in his tone than to his words, no doubt. Laurie dropped his newspaper; he was dead white under his end-of-summer tan, which in the circumstances looked like an unclean scum resting uneasily on the surface of his features.

"You did what?"

There was pure, focussed rage in every syllable of his voice. Alec's head jerked up.

 

Taking a slow, deliberate breath, Ralph said, "What would you have me do? You've already given me the benefit of your views on transporting 'tobacco and french letters'? What did you suppose the alternative was, if I was supposed to keep my self-respect?"

Every tendon and vein on Laurie's face and neck stood out. "And you told me the worst risk was that you might lose the launch! Tell me the truth for once: after all, it's the last time you'll have to make the effort for God knows how long. Once can hardly kill you. So: where were you? What the hell did take all that time?"

Even as part of his brain acknowledged the raw hurt behind Laurie's words - like a child crying to itself in a dark nursery from which the remote Olympians of its world have chosen to absent themselves - from somewhere outside Ralph's conscious mind or will a cool, dismissive tone imposed itself.

"Since you've finally chosen to ask, for your information I spent most of the time I was away nursing the boat's engine at less than five knots all the way home from Oran. After we'd dropped off Don Miguel we picked up some dodgy fuel, and the only way we could keep it from clogging the filters was by straining every drop through a couple of pairs of nylons Tómas had traded brandy and cigars for with a US boat, and which he was bringing back as a peace offering for Annunciata. It got a bit touch and go in spots but since we got home and no harm done it seemed better not to worry you with Might Have Beens. But then: when it comes to telling the truth, you've hardly been a shining example yourself, have you?"

Laurie's face spoke acknowledgement of the hit, even as his lips muttered, mechanically,

"I've got no idea what you can possibly be talking about."

"Excuse me," Alec said, his face a greenish-white, getting to his feet and barging through to the door, not heeding whose feet he tripped over in his haste to be gone. "I think I'll just go out for a walk; get a bit of fresh air."

The levanter was still blowing and the rain falling; it was the thinnest of excuses. They let him go without a word.

The check imposed by Alec's departure brought them to themselves a little. Laurie shook his head, like a swimmer trying to clear water from his ears, and started to murmur something vague, apologetic, palliative. But it had come to the point at last: Ralph knew that with the clear certainty with which in combat, sometimes, the right course of action had unrolled itself before him, complete and clear in all its details.

His voice was almost gentle. "We've come too far to go back, don't you think, my dear? Tell me: what did bring you back to the flat that night in Bridstow?"

He traced the impact of his question across the familiar, beloved features; it was as if he could see the twinge of each nerve. Laurie's faint indrawn breath seemed imbued with that quality of resignation which courageous men bring to the moment when they are led into the courtyard, the blindfold tied around their eyes, and they hear the booted sounds of the firing squad entering. His voice was steady, devoid of all his earlier anger.

"Alec told me. He guessed, you see, when he heard about the row. He guessed what might happen."

Ralph bowed his head in acknowledgement. He had invited the blow himself; it would be a fool's trick to complain that the edge of the weapon hurt more than he could have dreamt possible.

"Yes," he murmured, and he heard as if it were from a stranger the remote bleakness in his tone. "In the circumstances you could say it was a topic on which Alec had acquired a tolerable level of expertise. It wasn't an education I meant to press on you, though.

For some obscure reason Laurie's face was now suddenly ablaze with red fury.

"If you seriously think anyone except a complete imbecile - which, last time I looked, neither Alec nor I was - would even think of making that particular comparison then you're past praying for."

Ralph shrugged. "I can't see it's such an invalid comparison. Similar techniques producing similar results, after all. I'd been wondering for months what kept you here when you were clearly wanting to be anywhere but here. I hadn't realised it was that I was blackmailing you into it."

Laurie exhaled, explosively.

"Now that is imbecilic. Since you now know I read your letter, assume I understood it too, yes? _No patience with the people who do this sort of thing as a kind of repartee_ , remember?"

He hadn't, actually; he had only been conscious, while writing that letter long ago of trying to summon up the unambiguous clarity of expression he had aimed for at sea when leaving written orders to be opened in the event he was killed or put out of action. It made sense, of course, that Laurie should remember the actual words he had used so much more clearly than he.

"More fool me for deceiving myself. No-one does that sort of thing without half a thought for how many people will be weeping their eyes out at the funeral. And thoughts of that being a sort of revenge, I suppose. That most of all, I daresay."

"Revenge on your murderer?" Laurie's voice was so low one had to strain to hear.

"What? Don't be melodramatic, Spud, for God's sake. Not at a time like this."

"You've taken a long time to say it. I suppose I'm luckier than I deserve. But that's what you meant, isn't it? What I said that night on the staircase in the hospital -"

"Forget it, Spud. You weren't to blame for what you thought -"

Laurie shook his head, his face drawn.

"We both asked for honesty. Who are you to say where that stops? That night - I didn't apply the barest attempt at analysing what might really have happened. Less attempt to weigh the evidence than if I'd been told the charwoman was helping herself from the gin bottle. It was only later that I worked out why that was."

There was a bitter freight weighting his every word, and he avoided meeting Ralph's eyes.

"Part of me wanted it to be how I thought it had been. You'd showed me a part of myself I didn't want to know about it. I wanted to amputate that part, but as I'd had it rubbed into me that if there's a chance of saving a limb -"

His gesture took in his own shortened leg with its stiffened knee. Many years ago it seemed now he had in an agonised moment told Ralph that the doctors had been divided on whether the limb had been worth saving at all. Given the scale of the damage and the lightness and convenience of modern prosthetics no doubt there had been those who had argued that the effort put into saving the leg had been the merest sentimentality, and a waste of scarce resources, to boot.

"Well. I suppose I really wanted to be sure that part was gangrenous. And if that meant wanting to believe that of you, also -"

Laurie shrugged, the loathing for that earlier self (Ralph hoped, at least, not for his current self) twisting his face into a carven mask; something in which Agathon might have played Pentheus, in the final act of _The Bacchae_.

"I think - though I didn't know it at the time - I set out to kill that night on the staircase. And I almost succeeded. So there isn't, really, a lot to be said for me. So now you know everything."

Laurie's voice had dropped almost to nothing; he looked exhausted (more listless, even, in one sense than he had looked on the ship deck when Ralph had been called to determine whether he should be dropped overboard as a corpse).

He made his own voice very gentle.

"My dear, were you expecting that part to shock me?"

Laurie's head went back; he tried to suppress an inward rejoicing at the reaction. His tone was, in token, even more gentle than before.

"I did read your book, you know."

"But that isn't - that wasn't -" Laurie was flailing to get a grip on events, and, abruptly, achieved it. "That wasn't about us, you know."

Ralph nodded. He had never been the kind of idiot (briefly, the shade of Longenhurst hovered) who assumed that all literature was, at bottom, _roman à clef_.

"I know. But it was about that. It doesn't matter how or where we each face it for the first time - or for the twentieth, for that matter. We've each of us stood where you stood that evening. And everyone born like us will end up standing there at one time or another. The difference is that since you wrote down how it feels hundreds - thousands - of people have realised that they aren't standing on their own."

He paused, conscious of a profound irony. "You know; it was only after reading your book I realised how unnecessary - how completely absurd - that whole evening was."

Laurie looked up, his face alight with a hope and love that threatened to tear his heart from within his breast. A breath - a beat. But they were committed to telling the truth here, and if there were to be anything beyond he could not spare details for the sake of feelings. They had forever left the common dishonesty of coupledom.

"Of course, when I read that you have absolutely no idea how relieved I was to think that you'd never known how close I'd come to - well, you know."

Laurie's head had drooped again; that was to be expected. His voice was subdued.

"What do you plan to do now?"

Ralph had hardly thought. Something had happened, and it might be good or bad in the long run: it had certainly shaken him to the roots of his being.

"I can't say. I think better at sea, though. Something about the clarity with which you can see the stars. I'll let you know, of course. And you? Where will you go? Alec needs somewhere to stay while he makes up his mind what he's going to do, so don't worry about the house. And if Alec does find somewhere Tómas and Annunciata will keep an eye until I get back. So don't let any worries of that sort stop you."

 

Laurie acknowledged that with a movement of his head.

"You'll write while you're away?"

"Of course. Care of your agent; that'll be safest, won't it?

"Yes. Yes I suppose so."

The storm had blown through, leaving only an inexpressible weariness in its wake. Too soon yet to start reckoning the damage; that would have to wait until the sun rose again, and they could see what the devastation had wrought, and assess their chances of ever rebuilding. He turned towards Laurie, but what he had been planning to say died on his lips. Whatever else had been swept away the bedrock of their shared years remained.

Tonight that rock was still something to which one might cling, in default of other habitation. He was already moving forwards as Laurie stretched out his arms, and it was hard to say which was supporting the other as they made their slow, silent way upstairs.


	8. Chapter 8

In the fortnight or so that had passed since Ralph had gone to sea Laurie had found himself at loose ends, drifting idly round the house, writing letters and then throwing them into the wastepaper basket unsent - not that this mattered, since Ralph wouldn't reach port for weeks yet - thinking of what was needed to secure the house against the gales of winter, and, usually, finding that Ralph had been beforehand in that, too.

He found it difficult to make plans. He had thought himself stagnating in the narrow confines of society here on the Rock, suspecting that Ralph's fishing and smuggling friends saw him merely as his appendage; urban, useless and effete, like someone insisting on wearing patent-leather evening pumps on a country hike.

But their circle did not, it seemed, see it that way after all. Tómas and Annunciata had, if anything, opened their hearts and home more widely since Ralph's departure. Philippe, on learning that Laurie's spoken and written German was more than adequate, had beckoned him into a corner, one evening in Niko's. After much elaborate swearing to secrecy accompanied with gestures which would have been hair-raising had they not been so theatrical, he had produced from an inside pocket a black leather-bound diary, battered with long concealment, stained with blood and worse than blood.

"This," Philippe had said, "I have shown to no-body. I took it that night we were compelled to - There was something about the way he died that has always had me wondering, and I thought perhaps now enough time has passed that I should try to find out. You will translate it for me, yes?"

And Laurie had done so. At the end of which Philippe had nodded gravely and said, "Thank you. I thought as much. _Le pauvre bougre_ , he deserved a better country. It is a pity he had to die like that."

And Laurie, unable to think of anything to say in answer, had nodded, and ducked out of the bar leaving Philippe drinking rough brandy with a fierce wolfish smile of vindication on his lips, and gone home to a bed whose restless dreams, for once, were not of Ralph tossing alone on a life-raft far from shore but infused with the waste and pity of war.

His relations with Alec during these weeks were peculiar. Alec rose late, usually, and spent the remainder of the morning between the Post Office, the small reading-room where they took an erratic selection of the English language periodicals and the harbour mole, where he would sit looking out to sea sometimes for hours. He took no siesta (and indeed as the year turned through autumn it was becoming more a matter of habit than of need) and sometimes Laurie found him in early evening, wandering erratically about the streets of the upper town and stopping transfixed to look at odd, random things; a bunch of bright, tiny flowers clinging to a crack in a stone wall, or a lizard sitting on a stone to soak up the last rays of the sinking sun. If Laurie had had less experience in recognising the signs he would have said he had been drinking.

In the evenings Alec was prepared to be more companionable; they would go out for drinks or, very occasionally, a meal down by the harbour, but even there Laurie found him abstracted, noting he would break off from some cool, clinical speculation about the nature of "the fever then raging at Gibraltar" which had accounted for so many of those marble plaques on the walls of the chapel by the Governor's residence to look Laurie over with a detachment almost equally cool and clinical, as though assessing him for the emergence of dangerous symptoms.

But the flocks of migrating birds were coming in thicker and thicker across the Rock, and the rattle of gunfire in the early morning as the locals took their fill for the pot or for the mere joy of slaughter took Laurie back, waking uneasily in the grey dawn, to his early days with the Army in France, and still he could not make up his mind to leave.

It was Edward Longenhurst who decided that matter for him.

That morning Alec was uncharacteristically cheerful and had a faintly apologetic air, as though trying to make up for past sins of omission. Slightly conscious that his preoccupation with his own affairs might have led him to fail in his duties as host Laurie suggested they take advantage of the continued fine weather and go swimming at Rosa Bay, and undertook to provide the picnic, and Alec accepted the suggestion with alacrity.

So it was that Laurie had his arms full of bread and assorted cheese and sausage when he collided forcibly with someone departing in haste from the little branch of Coutts that occupied the corner of one of the squares in the upper part of town. The rolls flew everywhere and only in-built good manners inhibited his urge to curse at length and with the inventiveness honed by years of Ralph's companionship. On seeing who he had bumped into, Laurie rather regretted his forbearance.

"Laurie! What a pleasure! I was hoping I might see you boys on my little trip back to British territory. And tell me, how is darling Ralph?"

There was something a little too eager about Longenhurst's expression; Laurie cursed the efficiency of the gossip network. He had been right, he thought, a trifle wildly; once one touched it one never could get away from this world, no matter how lightly one tried to make one's foot fall.

He said briefly and without emphasis that Ralph's profession had taken him to sea again, and, without allowing Longenhurst time to comment, asked what brought him to Gibraltar, and would he be staying long?

Longenhurst giggled. "My dear, I know you'll think I'm quite the helpless dope fiend, but I simply cannot live without my tea. And then a very dear friend offered to drop two pounds of the best Earl Grey for me here - practically pre-War quality, goodness only knows what he had to do to get it - and as I had to come across anyway to pick up a remittance (Oh, those grubby little men in Westminster! How they have ruined foreign travel for us all!) I thought I might kill three birds with one stone."

And he fixed his eyes soulfully on Laurie's face.

"Laurie," a cool and infinitely welcome voice said from somewhere behind his left ear, "there you are. I'm sorry to drag you away but Tómas said he had to see you for some instructions about laying up the launch for the winter which he said Ralph would have been bound to have left with you, and it didn't sound as if it could wait until this afternoon."

Laurie turned to find Alec looking at him quizzically; the relief of seeing him was unexpectedly profound, as though he'd thrown a lifeline to haul him out of a snake-pit.

Which was patently absurd; Longenhurst was objectionable enough but more pathetic than anything, and certainly no danger to anyone.

"I'm sorry," Laurie said, turning back to Longenhurst. "One of those winter jobs I'd been putting off which has finally caught up with me. And one never realises just how true that tired old bromide about time and tide is until one actually has anything to do with boats, blast them. Goodbye; I hope you enjoy your tea."

Practice, a good boot at last and sheer determination enabled him to get a fair turn of speed out of the leg; certainly enough that he might quite plausibly have been out of earshot when Longenhurst recovered himself enough to bleat something after him about cocktails that evening, dear boy, since doubtless he must be at loose ends since Ralph's departure.

Alec, loping by his side, tactfully forebore to make any comment. Laurie felt another quick spark of gratitude to him for his sensitivity. And to Ralph, too: he must have taken the opportunity at some point to explain what a raw place that evening with Longenhurst had left on his spirit.

What was the point of writing at all if that was the response he was going to get? Longenhurst (and how many others? Perhaps the Bishop had not been so far off the mark after all) had taken for the hero the character Laurie had taken most pains to show as a moral cripple: someone who had taken a psychological quirk he'd been born with (which had been shaped by forces he could neither perceive nor compel) and treated it as an inexhaustible credit balance he could draw on for all eternity. "The dice were loaded against me from the start: therefore I owe the world nothing," had been Rattenbury's misbegotten creed, and from it, with proper classical inevitability, had come his tragedy.

Only Longenhurst, it seemed, had missed that particular point. That evening he had turned to Laurie, his eyes watering under the effects of gin and synthetic emotion, and declared tremulously,

"When I first came across Rattenbury - that beastly, beastly moment where he's treated so mortifyingly on the cricket pitch by that horrid hearty games captain - I all but wept. There I said to anyone who had the gumption to listen, speaks someone who has been there, who knows how it feels and who is not afraid to let the world know how it feels to stand in Rattenbury's shoes at a moment like that."

And Laurie, who had not had Hazell far from his thoughts as he created Rattenbury - though the two men were not, in many external respects, particularly similar - had almost been ill on the spot, until he had been brought back to some sense, at least, of proportion by the calming pressure of Ralph's hand on his thigh under the concealment of the bar table. And heard Ralph's coolly sardonic inflection as he said,

"Boots, surely, rather than shoes if he was playing cricket? Otherwise I'm not surprised the Head of Games was giving him hell."

Yes; it was typical of Ralph's thoughtfulness to have dropped a hint to Alec about Longenhurst. He must remember to thank him when he wrote.

Next morning Laurie realised, of course, that only a hopeless optimist would have dreamt that a pachyderm like Longenhurst would even have registered the snub, let alone been deterred by it. But by then the man was in his living room, and there was nothing to be done about matters. No help from Alec this time either; he had risen early, dressed with a jaunty precision which had been wholly foreign to his manner hitherto, and had vanished into town with an injunction not to fret should he not be back for lunch. He had volunteered no confidences and Laurie had sought none. He wished him the best of whatever it might be he was up to, and abandoned any hope of his assistance in the current matter.

This turned out to be nothing other than an invitation to Laurie to come to stay indefinitely with him in Tangier, on terms that the densest would have no trouble whatsoever decoding. While Laurie was still trying to retrieve his lower jaw from the floor and to put together a half-way polite but completely unequivocal form of refusal Longenhurst was prattling on in the blithe assumption that the whole thing was settled.

"And of course you'll be able to mix so much more with a _sympatique_ crowd that those oafs you've been forced to rub shoulders with here - but perhaps the less said about that the better. At least that sort of thing's all over now, thank God. Anyway, there's a simply wonderful mix of people congregating for the winter - very much our sort, of course; de Carteret has already opened up his villa for the winter season. They call him "the Sun Queen" you know." Longenhurst giggled, and gesticulated excitably.

"He's fantastically old now, of course, but his parties remain legendary. He's such an admirer of your work. When I told him you were only just across the Straits he positively demanded that you come to the next one. You see, dear boy, there are some people, even out here, capable of appreciating the fineness of your talent. And I can do so much for you - introduce you to all the right people, people who'll be really useful to you - if you'll only let me."

Laurie almost choked, and his carefully crafted, almost complete sentence of refusal was lost altogether.

Once, shortly after he and Ralph had first arrived in Gibraltar, they'd got stinking on red wine and brandy, sitting on the terrace at the Rock Hotel; glad in the first instance to be alive, glad to be together after the months and years of separation, glad to be out of grey, exhausted England and under the blue skies of the Med. Hardly able to talk himself, he'd challenged Ralph as visibly the drunker, and, when Ralph, laughing, contested the accusation Laurie had demanded he prove himself sober by reciting "the Leith police dismisseth us".

At which Ralph, his voice having the careful over-precision which only descended when he was very drunk indeed, had said,

"We aren't in Scotland, my dear, and my experiences of Rosyth and and Loch Eriboll are too recent to care to revisit them. But if you want me to prove I'm still capable of speaking straight, this might be a bit more suited to the locality."

And, his eyes crossing a little with the effort, he'd recited solemnly,

"God save us my dear from the Queer of Tangier.  
Whom absinthe makes fonder, whose fingers will wander;  
Who's had boys by the score, but who'll always want more  
Who joined with the Devil,  
And screwed the Bishop of Seville  
In some hellish revel.  
So God save us my dear from the Queer of Tangier."

 

And then, very softly, and as though something had sobered him up abruptly, he had indicated a doddery old man with parchment skin and a panama hat being seated by an obsequious waiter at a table further down the terrace,

"Good Lord. That's uncanny. And I thought he'd have been dead long ago, too."

Laurie had looked, struggling a little with the changed mood. Ralph's face in the lamplight of the terrace had looked suddenly hard, and a little fey, as though he had accidentally conjured an evil spirit by a rash incantation in one of the archaic sacred places of the world.

"I hadn't thought of that verse in years, and then the man it was written about actually walks into the hotel. Hugh de Carteret. Dabbler in anything and everything from black magic to belles lettres. Knew everyone from Blavatsky to Bosie - in every sense of the word, in the latter case, no doubt. Someone once dragged me to a party he was throwing, and I went because I thought it would be "interesting". God, Spud, when I think of your face when you found out what you'd got yourself into when you fetched up at Sandy's bash, and yet, you know, it was like a Sunday school picnic compared to de Carteret's orgy. I was twenty-four and thought I was unshockable. I think, Spud, you're right. I have had enough. Should we go?"

It was the memory of how Ralph's face had looked then that shaped Laurie's next words.

"Longenhurst, I think you'd better leave. Now. And don't come back."

Longenhurst was gaping at him, but there was the pressure of blood thundering in his ears and a fierce pleasure - like the pleasure he had used to get from walking over hills in a high wind, or swimming in a rough sea - as he abandoned all attempts at tact and temporisation.

"But Laurie - my dear boy - I don't understand -" Longenhurst bleated.

Laurie drew a deep breath.

"No. You don't. And you never will. I wouldn't discuss my personal affairs with you in any case I can conceivably imagine, but I can tell you that whatever you may have been told, or surmised, or speculated about is likely to have been utter and complete rot. But in any event, it's none of your business. If you were enough of a gentleman for it to mean anything at all I'd ask you to stop gossiping about it, but I'd have more chance of getting sense out of a parrot. So just get out. Now."

There was something about the expression on Longenhurst's face that was wholly unexpected and yet familiar; as though Laurie was seeing for the first time in real life something he had read or heard of in fiction. For a split second he racked his brains trying to work out what it was. And then it hit him.

_Hazell_. He gulped. Had that been how Hazell had looked when Ralph had lost his temper for the last time?

But before he could formulate his thoughts more clearly Longenhurst had flung his arms round his neck and was kissing him passionately; his tongue was trying to force itself between Laurie's lips and his breath was hot and coming in thick panting gasps.

Panic, revulsion, and an appalled sense that hysterical laughter was the only possible response to the sheer grotesque absurdity of the situation warred within him. Shockled and caught off balance it was difficult to free himself, and before he could do so there came the sound of a familiar voice from the doorway.

"Laurie, have you seen my - Oh, God!"

The note in Alec's voice spurred Laurie's efforts; with brutal efficiency (the sergeant who had taught him the basics of unarmed combat would be proud he had remembered so much) he broke out of Longenhurst's grip, thrusting him away from him with such vigour that he went sprawling across the floor. But by then Alec had gone.

Longenhurst looked up, bewilderment slowly changing to something more profoundly malignant on his expression.

"I see. Well, you haven't wasted any time, have you? Or - how long has that little _affaire_ been going on, after all? Quite the little hypocrite, aren't we? Well, I'm sorry to have - ah, queered your pitch."

Laurie grabbed Longenhurst by his shirt collar, twisting so that his face reddened as his air-supply was cut off and he choked. The savage within his blood exulted; it would take only that little, little extra force -

He choked back the thought, frog-marching Longenhurst to the door and thrusting him bodily out into the gutter. The effort was too much; his knee bent backwards treacherously. He clung for support to the door frame, determined not to let Longenhurst see him stagger or fall.

Longenhurst gathered himself together, his face a mask of hatred (the fall had bloodied his nose, too, a small part of Laurie's brain noted with a detached approval).

"Don't think you'll get away with this, you filthy little whore."

Laurie managed an indifferent shrug. From its stiff feel his face must be a mask of distaste; he could see it reflected back in Longenhurst's eyes. Longenhurst pulled himself to his feet and with a precise enunciation which reminded Laurie, incongruously, of nothing so much as a small boy reciting Casabianca for his governess began to swear, interspersing his obscenities with threats about what he would do to Laurie via his publishing connections.

Rather dully, Laurie stood in silence and let him run himself to a standstill without essaying anything by way of response. With one final piece of advice (notable for its staggering biological impossibility) Longenhurst took his departure. Having seen him out of sight Laurie locked up the house behind him with careful precision, though his hands shook.

Longenhurst might, for all he knew, be capable of making good on those threats, and he was certainly mean and vicious enough to try. But if he bankrupted him (Laurie's mind went nervously to unfulfilled contracts and spent advances) and ensured his voice was never heard again Laurie was damned if he would let that misapprehension caused by the scene in the living room (God! His skin crawled still to think of it!)destroy his good name with one of the few people whose opinion he valued.

Unsure whether it was the smoke of burnt bridges or the breath of freedom in his nostrils Laurie dropped the key into his pocket and went whistling down the hill into the town in search of Alec.

Alec was not in Nikos'. Phillippe, who was, gave a brief assessing look at Laurie's drawn white face (by now his leg was putting up a level of protest about the unaccustomed exertions of the morning which he was finding increasingly hard to ignore) and snapped his fingers for the barman, who produced, at a curt phrase, a glass of Fundador brandy which he stood over Laurie and watched him drink, despite his somewhat feeble protests.

"So," Phillippe said cheerfully, "a little early in the day, is it not, for a fight?"

Laurie looked up, sharply. Phillippe's expression - piratical as always - was nevertheless tinged with a benign approval. He gestured towards Laurie's right hand, which was resting on the table. The knuckles were already beginning to look a little puffy and he had, unwittingly until now, been massaging them with his other hand.

"The chin, yes? One cannot tell this to an Englishman of your type, but you would have done better to have gone for the gut. Him, he's soft enough there."

Laurie's expression of shock must have been apparent, because Phillippe laughed out loud.

"You alone expected your affairs to be a secret from anyone else on this Rock?"

After a second Laurie joined in the laughter. And to think he had thought the bush telegraph confined to Longenhurst and his friends! Phillippe made an explanatory gesture.

"I passed the fat -" (here Phillippe applied a descriptive noun to Longenhurst that had certainly never sullied the virginal pages of Larousse) "on my way up from the harbour - I have been night-fishing, you understand." There was something about the emphasis on "understand" that led Laurie to guess that whatever he had been fishing for had been left carefully buoyed and wrapped in oilskin. He nodded and Phillippe continued.

"He was almost running, so anxious he was to get back to his hotel. And his face! It was not difficult to guess what must have happened. And I knew he had been causing trouble for you and for the Captain." He paused, and then spat reflectively into the fireplace. "This man - Longenhurst? - takes foolish risks. I think one of these days he may find himself with a knife stuck in his fat belly."

Laurie swallowed, hard. It was moments like this that made him realise just how close they lived to the very edge of civilisation. Briefly he remembered the expression on Longenhurst's face as the punch had sunk home; the absolute bewilderment that anything so barbaric could possibly be happening to him, Edward Longenhurst, with his twee little flat somewhere in Chelsea with the Beardsley etchings and the Swinburne 'Firsts' that he babbled so endlessly about.

"I _hope_ ," Laurie said with cautious emphasis, "that was merely a prediction and not an invitation?"

"No?" Phillippe looked quizzically at him for a moment, and then shrugged. "I have killed far better men than him." His hand went towards the jacket pocket from which he had extracted the German officer's diary the other day. "But it will do very well as a prediction, instead. He takes no care where he goes; he chooses his enemies badly and his friends worse; he makes a big noise about being so wealthy (though he is not, I think, so wealthy as he would have people believe) and he thinks that everyone is for sale. He would be safer back in London."

It hit Laurie unpleasantly that from his own perspective he would be safer if Longenhurst were to remain indefinitely in Tangier. No doubt that, too, could be arranged with an oblique word or so. But - he gave himself a mental shake - even had he been that kind of man, these days there were telegrams and international telephone calls to render any such steps useless.

"I think I'm the one who needs to be in London, actually. Before he manages to stir up any more trouble. But I've got to find Alec first - you wouldn't happen to know -?"

Phillippe looked up at the clock behind the bar; it was just before noon.

"I think - by now - he will be at the Grand Hotel. With his friend the distinguished physician." He looked sidelong at Laurie. "Now Alexandre, he is not someone who chooses his friends badly."

"I can't say it's a trait I've noted before," Laurie snapped before he could stop himself. Phillippe grinned again.

"Ah, that. I meant, in important matters. Yes, I should think you would find him there."

 

Rather disconcertingly, Phillippe proved entirely correct. Alec was sitting having a pre-lunch sherry on a terrace table, opposite a silver-haired gentleman of startlingly deep tan, whom Laurie had little doubt was "the distinguished physician" Phillippe had asserted him to be. Alec made no move to introduce him. Laurie turned towards him.

"I do apologise, sir, for disturbing you." He turned back to Alec. "Alec; this shouldn't take more than five minutes, but I have to speak to you. It really is extremely urgent."

For a moment it looked as though Alec was weighing whether or not to refuse outright. Laurie put a desperate, silent appeal into his face, and Alec, rather heavily, got to his feet.

"Please excuse us, sir," he said to his companion, and followed Laurie round the curve of the terrace, out of earshot and sight line. His face, once the constraints imposed by his guest had been removed, looked thunderous.

"Look, what is it, Odell? I suppose if you're worried about this morning -"

"Alec, for God's sake if you're planning to behave like a fool about this at least could you _try_ not to be a bloody fool?"

The crisp decisiveness in Laurie's tone took even he himself by surprise. Alec shut up abruptly. Laurie followed up his temporary advantage without delay.

"If you'd waited another half-minute I could have asked for your help in kicking Longenhurst's backside for him. He grabbed me completely out of the blue: I punched his objectionable face, and he may well have broken his nose on the edge of the gutter outside our house, which is where he landed when I chucked him out. If I'd had two good legs I'd certainly have tried to kick him back to Tangier."

Alec looked down at Laurie's right hand; it was unclear whether for corroboration or out of simple professional interest. Whatever it was his voice changed, became friendlier.

"I should get some arnica put on that as soon as you can, if I were you."

Laurie grinned, a trifle ruefully. "Phillippe's professional opinion was I should have gone for the gut. Preferably with six inches of steel. Anyway, that isn't particularly important. What is, is that I've got to get the night boat to Marseilles today, and then on to London however I can."

Alec frowned slightly.

"Why do you have to go? Surely you can't suppose he'd be likely to press charges?"

"Only if he's a complete imbecile. However -"

He shrugged and Alec laughed, softly.

"Indeed. As you say. But nevertheless -"

"Nevertheless he's my publisher's nephew. And I'm in a jam about the new book. It's overdue and it just won't - well, I won't bore you with all that. Somehow, I haven't been able to write properly out here. Too much sunshine or something. Well, the long and the short of it is that Longenhurst could cause me a lot of trouble, and I'd rather be on the spot to try and limit the damage. You're welcome to stay on in the house as long as you want, of course."

"Thanks - though actually, I'm going to be on my travels myself sooner than I'd expected. But I'll explain about that later. Look here, Laurie -"

Alec's expression had changed; he almost looked contrite. "I'm sorry I was a bit of an ass about this morning. But I didn't honestly think anything like that. Heavens knows, we've all had our moments that looked at in the cold light of day - well, you know. But there are some idiocies I'd certainly never credit you with. I hope you didn't think - look, when I bolted it was more that - well, I've been at sixes and sevens ever since I left London, and I felt I just 'couldn't be doing with any of that there' as my mother's char used to say. the same when you showed up just now. I'm sorry."

It was as though the delirious world of a fever dream had suddenly tilted back to the level plain of cool, sober waking existence. Laurie had not realised until then how important Alec's good opinion was to him.

"Idiot! I hardly think you've got anything to apologise for. It's for me to apologise for dropping you into things -"

Alec looked at him. "Don't be absurd. If you two are going through a rough patch - well, I'm the last person who's going to throw that in your face. Look; I know that however much he tries to pretend he can ever settle down in a country cottage with roses round the porch or however he sets it out for himself in his own head the fact is that - as you'd know perfectly well if you'd admit it to yourself - Ralph gets the worst case of port rot known to man if he's a fortnight on shore together, and no berth in the offing. No use pretending; he's intolerable when land-bound, and worse when he won't admit it to himself."

Alec, having delivered himself of this tirade, frowned slightly. "Odd, you'd think, for old Ralph to be so besotted with the sea, given the bloody thing's invariably personified as female?"

The conversation had, in a few short moments, transgressed so far beyond the usual polite equivocations that it seemed entirely reasonable to be totally honest in responding to it.

"He told me once," Laurie said, "that the only women he could really get on with were absolute bitches."

Alec grinned. "I suppose - for the psychologists of my acquaintance - that would make the sea the über-bitch?"

"I expect so."

But it was more than that. During the days, weeks and months of the War Ralph had fought the Battle of the Atlantic, and Laurie had sat snug, overworked, and bored in his Ministry job which he knew intellectually (and was informed repeatedly by propagandists of one stripe or another ) was just as crucial to the War Effort as anything done on the score or so of Front Lines where the penalty for one's inevitable failures was thrust in one's face, written in blood which splashed warmly over one.

And he hadn't believed a word of it. Although Ralph had never said anything, Laurie's consciousness that Ralph had had a conspicuously good war ,and that he had not, had - he realised - always nagged at the back of his mind. He wondered, now, whether it was about time he got over that sense of inferiority.

A number of things suddenly clicked into place. But he had first to clean up the difficulties caused by Longenhurst.

He grinned at Alec. "Well, I suppose I'd better be getting back to the house to start packing."

Alec looked faintly awkward. "Can I introduce you to Professeur Dubois, first? I'm sorry about earlier, and goodness only knows what he must have thought. And I'm rather keen to stay on his good side; he's just offered me a job."

"A job? Congratulations."

"I suspect the congratulations should go to Lyall-Owens. He must have been pulling every string he could find ever since I left London. And he's reeled in Professeur Dubois. You see - he's running a big hospital out in French Indo-China -"

"Indo-China!"

Alec waved a hand airily. "I have suddenly discovered a life-long desire to explore the East."

Laurie must have looked sceptical. Alec's face changed; he was making a conscious effort to sound reassuring, it seemed.

"Seriously, though, while I'd not have thought of it if the Nurse Urquhart complication hadn't arisen, it is a fantastic opportunity."

He looked, Laurie thought, almost on fire. And he could see, now he thought about it, the logic of that: Alec had from the first struck him with the single-mindedness of his approach to life and if Alec was determined to make a go of Indo-China then he would undoubtedly succeed. Laurie's congratulations, as they walked back along the terrace towards the table where Professor Dubois was sitting, were wholly sincere.

It came as a surprise - and Laurie found himself feeling genuinely touched - to see how many people came to see him off at the quayside. Annuciata was even crying, a little, as she assured him that no-one would have a house on the Rock better cared for than his own in his absence. And at the end, just before the boat was about to leave, and Laurie was actually standing on the gang-plank, Phillippe thrust his way through the groups and pushed a small packet into his hand.

"Here," he said abruptly. "It may be that with the people you know in London you will be able to think of a way to return it to his family, and to let them know that he died well."

There was no time to do anything more: he was being bustled on board. He stood at the ship's rail until the little group on the quayside had vanished to specks, and then been swallowed by the darkness.


	9. Chapter 9

It struck Laurie, back in London for the first time in nearly two years, that the sheer exhausted drabness of the place had increased well beyond that which he remembered.

The dragging hopelessness of the city reflected off the people one bumped into on the streets or who jostled one on the Tube; their faces wan, their eyes dull, each locked in his own dreary preoccupations. He found himself continually touching the cover of the battered book Philippe had given him as though it was a sacred talisman. The war, even his curtailed and limping share of it, had had its own texture, its own urgency, its own meaning: it had possessed a sort of vigour even (perhaps especially) when one hated it most. This nothingness was, he supposed, the Post-War for which they had all hoped for so long. And, he realised as a kind of belated truth, the Post-War was by definition amorphous; it had no boundaries, and therefore could not be won.

It was a relief to see that Challans, at least, was unchanged. The stocky, dark little man got up and came round from behind his littered desk to pump Laurie's hand vigorously.

Half apologetically Laurie pulled from his battered, bulging attaché case a by-now somewhat tired brown paper package which Annuciata - gathering, somehow, through the quick telepathy of the Rock and her own native instincts, that this meeting would be of importance to him - had thrust into his hands on the dockside.

"My - er - housekeeper - insisted I bring this for you. For - ah - 'los pocitos'. "

It was only the sight of Challans' face as he sneaked a quick glance into the half-open parcel (Annuciata's skill lay not in gift-wrapping, and the Customs inspectors at Marseilles had been thorough) which brought home to Laurie how much his country had sacrificed in the recent struggle. Good grief; it was only a dozen oranges or so, half a kilo of cheap _turrón_ and a few trifles of that sort, not all the wonders of Aladdin's cave at the pantomime!

"Very decent of you to think of the little brats at all, Odell," Challans said. "Can't have been easy to get this through Dover with all these asinine regulations to trip a chap up these days, hey?"

Laurie murmured something deprecating - a local saw (based, he had been surprised to learn lately, upon a saying of Pompey) to the effect that to the Gibraltarian it was necessary to smuggle, but not necessary to live - and found Challans's bird-bright eyes fixed beadily upon him.

"Out with it, Odell," Challans said briskly. "I can't do anything about any sort of trouble my clients may be in unless they're prepared to give me chapter and verse."

His mouth must have gaped open because Challans laughed openly.

"Odell! I've been doing this job since a kind and disreputable uncle got me a few introductions once I'd recovered from being gassed off the Line in April '18. Don't try to come over like a Girton virgin experiencing the boatshed lofts in May Week. From the minute you walked through that door I've known you were in trouble. So spit it out, man. Behind on the book and can't think of anything to write, is that it?"

Laurie sank, weak-kneed, into one of the two easy-chairs towards the rear of the office Challans flung himself energetically into the other one. By some almost supernatural agency Miss Radcliffe, Challans' efficient secretary, made her appearance at that moment with a tray bearing tea-pot, milk-jug and two cups, deposited it on the occasional table between the two chairs, and departed. Challans poured for them both in silence, which Laurie was compelled to break.

"Yes, but it's not that."

Challans raised an interrogative eyebrow.

"It's Longenhurst," Laurie muttered weakly. Challens exhaled.

"Is it, indeed?"

There was a note in his voice which was hard to interpret. Laurie raised his eyebrows. Challans shrugged.

"Well? As you know, he's only Morris's wife's nephew. And which of us doesn't have connections-by-marriage we'd rather disavow, given half a chance, eh, Odell?"

That particular question caught like salt on a gaping wound. The vision of the Rev. Straike caught in his throat, leaving him momentarily speechless.

Challans looked at him.

"Come on," he said, "spill. Or do you need me to fill in the blanks for you? The execrable Longenhurst has been talking as though you were his own personal discovery for some time now. I suppose he thinks he has to do his best to flatter his own judgment given that so many of his recent swans have turned out to be geese. The trouble is he's started to believe his own advertising."

Challans took a sip of tea. "I suppose he showed up in Gib and tried to trade off the obligation he expected you ought to feel towards him, and you told him what was what and he threatened to turn nasty. Be frank, Odell, was that about the size of it?"

Laurie nodded helplessly. Challans laughed.

"You aren't alone, you know. You might not know it, but the rumour on the Bloomsbury cocktail party circuit is that he didn't precisely go off to Tangier simply to "immerse himself in the local culture", whatever he might have said."

Laurie's voice had an edge which startled even him. "Hm. Well, he was certainly immersed pretty deeply last time I saw him."

Challans grinned. "Yes, I can assure you the cocktail party set have picked up on that one, too. Nevertheless, the fact is that Morris and he haven't been seeing eye to eye for some time - and I know for a fact that a number of Morris's authors have told him that if they have to deal with Longenhurst for the future they'll be seeing what Faber or Longman can do for them for their next works. And they say Morris and his wife may be getting divorced in the New Year, which can't help Longenhurst's position in the firm."

Laurie finished his tea and leaned back in the armchair with an assumed air of nonchalance.

"It sounds as though attending cocktail parties was a rather important part of your job."

Challans grinned. "You have literally no idea how important. Though it's still not as important as making sure my authors don't go off their feed and let themselves down in the final straight."

He leant forward, his face suddenly serious.

"You know, Odell, absent my commission I could have wished your first novel hadn't been the runaway success it was - or at least, that it hadn't been that sort of success."

He lit a cigarette and held his case out for Laurie, who accepted. "In my experience, Odell, most people's first novel is more or less bad."

He must have been looking mortified, because Challans smiled.

"Yours was a lot better than the general run of first novels, but still - there was a lot of clutter in it you no doubt needed to get off your chest before you could really start writing. Your trouble was that it sold - thanks in no small part to the good Bishop -"

Laurie felt his mouth twisting up wryly. Challans had noticed it too, evidently.

"I don't doubt that when you came to decide what to leave in and what to discard when writing the next one that the question about whether you might be losing that golden touch was lurking around the back of your mind - just where it has no business to be for a writer at your stage of his career!"

There was too much truth in that. Laurie began to say something, but Challans stopped him with an economical gesture sketched in the air.

"The problem, it seems to me, was that the Bishop found you an audience, but they were - if you'll forgive my saying so, Odell - rather too _specialised_ an audience. At least for you, at this stage in your writing career."

There was quite clearly nothing Laurie could say to that. Uneasily, he remembered a party, long ago, and conclusions drawn then and never resiled from.

Challans got to his feet. "Come on! For some reason, whatever else seems to become more and more strictly rationed, gin seems to be still obtainable. I'll take you round the corner to the Ring O'Bells, and you can show me whatever it is you've been writing when it wasn't your novel."

"But I said - "

Challans laughed. "Odell - I'm sure there's more in that attaché case than smuggled nougat. I said - I've been looking after authors for a long time. You may try to tell me that you haven't written a line in the last three years - but then, my wife claims to be an insomniac, but every night when she tells me she hasn't slept a wink all night I can distinctly remember an hour or so when I've been lying await waiting for her to stop snoring."

Despite himself, Laurie laughed. It was true; there were a few sketches and snippets buried in there - things he had jotted down over his time on the Rock. But none of it led anywhere; Challans would see that sooner or later.

He pushed himself to his feet and reached for his hat.

"I'm afraid I'm a bit of a hopeless case, Challans," he said. "But provided you allow me to buy the gins, you can try to convince me otherwise."

They made their way down the stairs and out into the chill of the drab street outside.

Laurie found himself at loose ends the next day. Challans - after making what Laurie thought of as a ridiculously disproportionate (though nonetheless heartwarming) fuss about the fragments in the attaché case - had given him a brisk order not to clutter up the scene until told it might do some practical good.

"Morris," Challans had said, "is at heart a gentleman. And his profession is still one which claims some gentlemanly values. Furthermore, while he could - of course - sue you, what use would it be? Perhaps he gets his advance back - so what? It might have been generous for a second novel, but it isn't as if it was enough to make a ha'porth of difference in the fortunes of his firm. Or - at best - you deliver a rushed, late, resentful book, and force him to make the best of it. And as I said, his authors are already somewhat unsettled. Once the news got round - and I assure you, it would get round - his problems would merely be compounded. Especially if it were known to have been Longenhurst's doing. No; let me tackle Morris. And keep your head down until I've done it."

So Laurie found himself thrown upon the chilly comforts of the intensely - ironically - respectable private hotel near Russell Square he had booked practically at random. Fairly soon that morning the atmosphere of godliness, stale boiled cabbage and horsehair proved too oppressive to linger in. He was driven to wander out into London, with no specific object in view and the few ideas which came to him seemed to be ruled out either because of war damage or Austerity.

Eventually he found himself in the British Museum, where the galleries still had the odd, denuded appearance which denoted that much of the permanent collections had not been retrieved from caverns in the Mendips or whatever other refuge had been found for them against the Blitz.

But there was enough remaining in the Graeco-Roman galleries to give him, nonetheless, a sense of homecoming which had eluded him so far. He had spent too much time here, stolen hours in half-term holidays, a sketch-book on his knee to provide some kind of alibi against overly inquisitive grown-ups, who would not have understood. These were not exhibits; they were the friends and companions of his youth: the discus thrower concentrating all his thoughts and hopes on the eternal Olympic now, the young ephebe gentling his horse as it reared before the battle that was the first blooding for them both, the grave senator receiving the news of defeat or victory with the same impassive stoicism.

Those sculpted robes had draped exactly so over those marble limbs for two millenia, those eyes had looked gravely out across the ruin of civilisations which were now no more than names, and still gazed non-judgmentally down at him. For the first time it seemed in years Laurie found himself with space to think at last.

It was some hours before he went out into the streets of London, and now he had a direction to his movements.

Once Laurie had determined on returning to England the notion of going down to his home village and doing something about his mother's grave had been haunting him as a duty to be performed. The thought of meeting the Rev. Straike had been daunting - and of course, while in ordinary circumstances one might hope to dive in and out of the village without risking the encounter, the churchyard was so much Straike's particular property, especially since the Vicarage front windows overlooked it, that the encounter was more than probable. Nor could one expect that tact or family feeling would deter the Rev. Straike from pressing it.

It was hardly a meeting to which anyone could look forwards. But Laurie had sternly pushed such doubts away as cowardice, though they had remained as a small, tight, unhappy knot below his midriff.

Beneath the cool archaic scrutiny of the friezes other thoughts had been able to emerge.

What was the point of visiting his mother's grave at all? A ritualistic piety, like Antigone breaking Creon's commands to sprinkle dust on her brother's broken body? A superstitious observance, the placatory appeasement of the household gods? A dare, proving to himself, like a child running up to a house where lives a ferocious watchdog, that he could conquer his fear of Straike's unctuous disapproval? Or a genuine manifestation of faith?

Laurie had not so much lost his faith as woken up one day at school - sitting in the bluebottle-haunted chapel, with the service droning interminably on - with a vague sense that any God who allowed someone like Jeepers to entreat him at length in that nauseating nasal whine without striking him dead on the spot from a sense of pure aesthetics was a rather poor excuse for a Supreme Being. Later on, of course, the various Buchmanites and OICCU members one encountered in College had done their best to save his soul (especially since he had become known to be associated with Charles Fortescue and his set, whom those types distrusted with a deep instinctive loathing, despite having - Laurie supposed - too much innocence to understand how right they were). They had retreated baffled before Laurie's unshakeable conviction that their faith existed mainly to convince themselves that they had an importance to the universe which empirical evidence indicated they completely lacked. Even his brief acquaintance with Andrew had served less to convince him that Christianity was a serious belief than that it was one serious people might believe.

At that time it had not occurred to Laurie to wonder how his mother had felt about the same matter. During his childhood she had always appeared thoroughly, conventionally faithful - he would have thought that the sun would stop in its tracks sooner than think of his mother being late for Morning Service on a Sunday, or preferring the easy option of a lie-in. Her marriage had seemed to be an unequivocal throwing of her lot in with the Church, and all that entailed in terms of his perpetual exile.

Nevertheless, during the few scattered, guilty weekends he had been pressured into spending at the Vicarage during the War (conscious of his stepfather's eye on him as if Straike were a Government spy, and Laurie a fifth columnist dreading a fatal slip) he had started to reach a different conclusion. His mother had been an accomplished actress, much in demand for village pageants and amateur productions 'got up' for worthy causes. But Laurie had learned to detect when his mother liked the part allocated to her and when - with infinite grace, as ever - she had accepted a role she did not care for. The parts she liked she threw herself heart and soul into. Those she did not - she adopted with even more conspicuous fervour. The last two or three weekends he had spent at the Vicarage, he had detected a familiar note about her too-energetic embrace of church business.

Would it, in truth, be cowardice if he avoided the encounter altogether? The memorial in the churchyard was a symbol, nothing more; his mother was not there, not in any sense that mattered. And if she were - how would she feel if Straike did see him, and made a scene?

He remembered her long-ago views on the school performance of Hamlet.

"So vulgar, that fight in the grave. You can hardly imagine that Ophelia would have thanked either her young man or her brother for making such exhibitions of themselves." And then, laying her hand confidingly on his arm, "Not that one can blame you, dear. You played it in a most dignified way."

There was no help for it. The friezes had given him what counsel they could, but he needed another human mind to help him clarify what he truly wished to do.

Someone with clearer judgment than he, who might cut through the competing claims of self to the bedrock of what was right below.

He found the name in the telephone book without difficulty. It was the same address as the one he'd noted down seven years ago, almost incredibly given how the East End had suffered through the war. He thought, momentarily, of calling ahead to see that there was someone there, but that, suddenly, felt like cheating.

On a whim, throwing himself upon the fates, Laurie made his way towards Holborn tube.


	10. Chapter 10

Not enough had changed about the street. There were more gaps between the meanly respectable, double-fronted houses, and fireweed had had time to grow among the rubble, colonising the bomb-sites. Dessicated stalks, caught here and there with the wispy seedfluff of summer's end, poked up wherever he looked.

But "The Beeches" and the number 50 were still carved deeply into the cement above the doorway, and, as he had found once before, the door remained unlocked, just on the latch, so that when he pushed it he found himself back in the hall, the mingled, once-smelt, never forgotten composite of boiled cabbage, carbolic soap and freshly-made toast filling his nostrils. For a moment he was literally unable to breathe.

The hall, however, was curiously cluttered; camp-beds, primus stoves, tent pegs, tea-chests marked "Dry stores" and "Crockery - WITH CARE" were piled everywhere. It looked like the combined preparations for a Boys' Brigade excursion to the seaside and an expeditionary force.

In the gloom Laurie stubbed his toe on the edge of a tea-chest painted with the Red Cross and, barely, repressed an urge to swear. He raised his voice hesitantly.

"Hello? Is anyone in?"

The door at the end of the hall - the one that led towards the kitchen area at the back - opened, and a figure was outlined against the light.

Recognition was instant. Laurie caught his breath.

"Andrew?"

Betrayingly, his voice made it not quite a question; part of his mind, raged, furiously at himself. All the time he had been telling himself that it was Dave whose advice had been seeking, his sub-conscious had had another agenda. He knew that now it was too late to turn aside from the meeting.

And now that he had compelled the fates to do his bidding, a little cold voice nagged at him.

_What now? For no-one can bathe twice in the same river._

Andrew's voice sounded unnaturally calm.

"Good heavens. Laurie. I didn't even realise you were in England."

It seemed of inordinate importance to achieve the same equanimity.

"I'm sorry. I should have telephoned ahead. I hadn't expected you were going to be here: I was in London on business, and I was just hoping to have a word with Dave about something -"

The light was too poor for Laurie to be able to tell how Andrew reacted to that, but there seemed - or was it just imagination? - to be a curiously flat note about his voice as he responded.

"Oh? Well, you'd better come through and I'll put the kettle on, then. I shouldn't think he'd be too long, but you never know - he's had to go up to Whitehall, to see if he has another crack at someone else who someone knows it might do some good - "

 

"I'm sorry?" Andrew's rapid flow of speech - the plunge _in media res_ without a shred of background information - betrayed, Laurie thought, an underlying unease about this unexpected interview, which he was striving to conceal. Openess - innocence - had been so central to Laurie's concept of Andrew that even this - which in anyone else he would have accepted, almost applauded, as a tactful smoothing over an awkward situation - was in Andrew jagged-edged, wrong.

They were in the kitchen now; a thin pale sunshine slanted through the window onto the oilcloth-covered table. Andrew slopped water into the kettle, lit the gas with an audible popping sound, turned away from the stove and smiled, heartbreakingly.

"Of course. We've been saturated in it for so long now. I'd forgotten it could have come as news to anyone. Some of us thought it was time we went back to Germany."

"Went back?"

It occurred to Laurie, with something of a shock, that he had only the haziest idea of how Andrew had spent the rest of the War. He made the appropriate enquiries. Andrew, responding with a straightforward matter-of-factness, seemed not to have given any thought to whether Laurie might not, in the circumstances, have taken more of an interest.

Andrew's account was shorn of dramatics or heroic posturing, but then, it hardly needed it. As a member of an ambulance crew he had been at the forefront of the push back into Europe, and where the armies had gone Andrew and his colleagues had followed a bare half-pace behind, picking up the wreckage. They had seen at first hand the devastation that war had left of Europe, and the crowds of starving people with the hopeless eyes who clung on, barely, to the cracks in the wrecked buildings that had once represented a pinnacle of civilisation.

"And Germany's the worst," Andrew said, pouring out the tea. "We simply can't afford to make the mistakes again that were made in the 1920s. You hear people speaking nonsense on the streets or writing to the newspapers about the Axis powers having done better out of defeat than we've done out of victory, and 'Putting England first' but that's worse than selfish: it's short-sighted. There can't be another War; there simply can't. Not after Hiroshima. And if we leave Germany to starve, and let the Russians sweep in everywhere, and then have the Americans having to take their own position - well, I'd don't have to spell it out."

His skin glowed from within with the sheer blazing flame of his sincerity; it brought back memories too fragile and painful to have seen the light of day in years. Laurie found himself having to check an unconscious reaching out to put his hand on Andrew's arm. Fortunately he could convert the gesture to reaching for the milk-jug before Andrew noticed anything.

He hardly knew what to say: the blood thundered in his ears. It was a relief when the back door opened at that moment.

If Dave felt any surprise at seeing Laurie sitting at the kitchen table he didn't show it.

"Hello, Laurie. Good to see you after so long. Any more in that pot? Talking to civil servants is thirsty work."

Andrew raised his eyebrows. "Any good?"

Dave shook his head. "No - nothing doing. Though it took a lot of beating about the bush before we established that. But it's hardly fair to bore our visitor with our problems."

Laurie felt a faint breath of exclusion. It was that, presumably, that led him to leap in quickly, defensively.

"Oh, it's not a bore. Andrew's been explaining all about it. Can I help? What's the Ministry? My civil service contacts are a bit elderly, but I might be able to drag someone out."

Dave spread his hands. "It's kind of you to offer, but I'm not sure the door's still open. You see; it isn't a case of our not having the money. There's been plenty by way of donations - an opportune little legacy - that sort of thing. The fact is, do what we might we can't persuade the Treasury to let us take enough of it out to do anything effective with it. And there isn't apparently a space in the regulations for what we want to spend it on."

"Bread upon the waters isn't a proposition which apparently appeals to the Whitehall mind," Andrew murmured.

It was at that moment when the idea hit Laurie. Fragments of his discussions with Challans came swirling back:

_"They're only doodles."_

_"It doesn't matter. They're doodles showing real, complex human beings. True: their daily activities and surroundings might be as far away as you can imagine from the average reader's. And yet; they're not caricatures, or exotics, or rare wild beasts, or fancy puppets."_

_Challans had gesticulated excitedly - only Laurie's swift grab had protected his pint from his flailing elbow._

_"Most writers who try foreign settings get it wrong. It's as though they're saying, 'Look here. Aren't they freakish? Isn't it all tremendously amusing? Come and see the almost human apes.' You don't. The middle-to-highbrow American magazines are crying out for that sort of stuff about post-war Europe, provided you found the right mix of subjects. And they'd pay dollar rates and I could probably place the compilation afterwards with no trouble whatsoever. And you'd write yourself back into the groove, and leave the Bishop and all that behind you."_

For an instant as Laurie sat at the table, looking at Andrew's carved, resolute profile and the weary resignation of Dave's expression it all seemed breathtakingly simple. Fate had led him here, after all.

The right sort of subject. The right place to be. A second chance. A task of vital importance, to which he could bring a unique contribution. A whole raft of things came together in Laurie's mind. For too long he had allowed himself to drift where the current took him. It was time and past time for him to start striking out in the direction he chose.

This sudden decisiveness coupled with the sense at last of having found a job to do was exhilarating; almost intoxicating. He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. "I think I might have an idea. You'll be around during the next few days, if I were to 'phone?"

Laurie was almost at the Tube station before he remembered that he hadn't, after all, got round to asking Dave what to do about his mother's grave. But it was hardly the major dilemma he had been trying to turn it into. He'd overlooked her earlier, but surely Aunt Olive could do whatever the conventions required. She would be flattered to be relied on. He would write her a letter this very evening.

It was only when he opened his writing case and found the most recent of a succession of half-finished, unsent letters on his writing block that another voice made itself heard; familiar and reproachful.

_And what of me?_

Laurie tore off the top page of the writing block and tossed it into the waste-paper basket. But its presence remained, baleful and accusing, for the rest of the evening.


	11. Chapter 11

The next few days were, then and forever afterwards, a blur. Challans' enthusiasm for the idea had been unbounded, and his energy in promoting it scarcely less so. To his somewhat bewildered amusement, Laurie found himself dragged into a succession of meetings with people Challans thought might be useful, even attending one or two of the infamous cocktail parties. The whole process had culminated in a long discussion in the over-chromed bar of a big hotel somewhere in the West End with an American named Baxter who, from an unfortunate resemblance in features and overall air of well-fed and manicured self-satisfaction, Laurie had initially been inclined to write off as a transatlantic take on the Longenhurst model. Fortunately for the success of the evening, a passing reference to Algeçiras Bay, in the context of one of Laurie's sketches, had produced the wholly unexpected biographical sidelight that Baxter had an intimate knowledge of Spain. As a reporter during the Civil War he'd slogged from one end of the country to the other, mostly under fire. Under that slightly too emphatic suit he'd still got the shrapnel scars to prove it. If he looked, now, as though he was enjoying the comforts of home a little too much, no-one could deny he'd earned them.

The evening caught fire in mutual reminsciences of field station expedients and the fantastic grotesqueries of war. Rather later Laurie caught Challans' bird-bright eyes on him, and the ghost of a small, knowing smile.

Laurie left the bar with a commission for an initial series of six articles, and an ingenious set of proposals for paying expenses and advances in dollars outside the sterling area which led him to suspect that - despite surface appearances - the New Yorker had more in common with Tómas and Philippe that he would ever have with Longenhurst. Laurie wryly recollected past disputes about how the conflict between the pragmatic and the proper course was ever to be resolved, and hoped Andrew would not press him too closely on the financial details.

During the few days that followed, he would at least have welcomed an opportunity to avoid such pressing. There had only been time for two visits out to The Beeches, and he had seen Andrew on neither of them. Even that first time Laurie thought he had detected Dave looking at him with a half-questioning air, as though trying to gauge whether Laurie might, perhaps, have an ulterior motive for his presence.

Once that suspicion rooted itself, it became impossible on Laurie's later visits even to mention Andrew - no matter in the most prosaic and fleeting of contexts - without the self-consciousness that his tone, his expression - even the tint of his skin which, as ever, blushed betrayingly at the slightest awkwardness - was subject to the scrutiny of those keen, unembarrassed, non-judgmental eyes.

Laurie would have liked to put Dave's mind at rest, but this was something Laurie was unable to disentangle even for himself. His first sight of Andrew long ago had had such an impact on his own personal universe that in looking back into his own history he found himself mentally assigning events before and after his stay in the EMS hospital near Bridstow.

Their recent reunion had been almost equally disturbing, though not in any way he could have predicted. Laurie played the recollection over and over to himself, as if he was a film projectionist, endlessly sitting through the same show. 

The first thing which had struck him, unsurprisingly, had been Andrew's physical presence.

Over the intervening seven years - which accounted for how many decades of subjective experience for all of them? - Andrew had changed almost beyond recognition.

 _Grown up, you mean?_ the baleful inner voice which had been his constant companion these last few weeks commented. But that particular thought was a bitter one, and he shied from it. The voice did not press the matter, though he caught a breath of mocking, bitter laughter.

The man Andrew had become was wholly admirable. And yet, when Laurie, stumbling awkwardly, tried to convey some flavour of the sort of thing one simply did not say, Andrew had merely smiled.

But that, too, merely emphasised how far behind was the past. With a pang Laurie saw Andrew's features no longer composed themselves into the cool, detached amusement which the sculptors of the Museum friezes had sought to capture in marble. Instead, his expression conveyed a warm, wry appreciation of the excellence of God's jokes, whether encompassed in the duck-billed platypus or in one's own absurd mortality. One would have thought it wholly charming, had one not seen what it had replaced.

He'd stretched back in the hard kitchen chair, taller - surely - than Laurie remembered, wholly at ease in his own skin.

"I shouldn't say I'd got very far. But I daresay I wouldn't have got anywhere at all if I hadn't had a boost by people giving me credit for seeming, just long enough for me to realise it was time I started being instead, and that I needed to try to grow into that. Having someone start one off in the right direction; that's more important than anything. After all, even St Paul didn't know which end of the road was the right one in the beginning."

Almost there was a pin-prick of resentment at the carelessness of his ease. Oblivious, Andrew continued.

"You know; I think that book you gave me helped remind me what I'd missed, not keeping on with Greek through everything. After that, I tried to do more. I ended up re-reading _The Seven_ in the ruins of Thebes. On the hillside, with the cicadas whirring and the smell of the wild thyme, and the German guns advancing all the time on the position so we knew we'd be having to get the wounded out before nightfall. About the last place, one would have thought, to need someone like Aeschlyus to tell one what an idiocy war is. The absurd thing was, when I finished, there were tears in my eyes. And then the shelling started again, and we had to run to our stations. Which made the whole mess seem even more futile than it had before."

Suddenly conscious (cold breath on the back of his neck and hairs rising) of another presence in the room, another's corner to defend, Laurie had snapped,

"But Aeschylus fought at Marathon, all the same."

For the first time Andrew's voice had held the hurt, almost sulky tones of a much younger man, flicked on the raw by some stinging dismissal from his elders, and too unsophisticated - or honest - to disguise it.

"But it was after Marathon he wrote _Seven against Thebes_. Don't you think it would have made some difference?"

And Laurie, suddenly remembering perhaps too much, had caught his breath, and then made a business of getting up to make more tea, lest Andrew might have noticed.

No. It was hardly as if he were in a position to enlighten Dave about ulterior motives.

It was easier to avoid mentioning Andrew altogether. And they not were gravelled for want of other matter. With Baxter's dollars greasing the wheels, and a slight relenting on the part of the Treasury (encouraged by Laurie's renewed contacts with one or two of his war-time colleagues - he had not imagined, he thought ruefully, that the drier reaches of the Civil Service would be susceptible to the snob-appeal of literary fame, particularly of the scandalous variety) they were in a position to start sooner than he had expected. The pressure of last minute business was frightening. There was enough to keep Laurie occupied so thoroughly until the planned date of embarkation as almost to preclude any hope of further visits to The Beeches.

He wondered, as he made his way to the Tube station on the last occasion, whether Andrew would be sorry about that fact. And whether Dave would be glad of it.

Not without trepidation, Laurie found time to accept Baxter's unexpected invitation to dinner at the Savoy shortly before his planned departure date. The American, it seemed, was finding post-War London infinitely tedious, and yet pressure of business kept him there. And certainly the horrors of "Evening Dinner" at Laurie's hotel would have driven the primmest Vestal to sup with Caligula.

Not thirty minutes into the evening Laurie realised he had worried unnecessarily. Once or twice during the evening Baxter looked at Laurie with a quick, subtle glance, as if to say, "Had things been different, we might have shown each other something, you and I. What a pity your thoughts are so evidently bent elsewhere, and I am too much of a pragmatist - and, perhaps, of a romantic - to accept the challenge of trying to turn their direction." But there was nothing anyone could possibly object to in his manner; the contrast with certain recollections was profound. Laurie tried - to the extent, at least, that it would not lead to further complications - to show that he had noticed, and was grateful.

Both food and conversation flowed more freely than Laurie - with a slight shock - realised he had experienced since Ralph had left Gibraltar. Almost unconsciously, he embarked on the story of Philippe's notebook, and, seeing nothing but a profound and understanding interest in Baxter's expression, went to the cloakroom to retrieve it from his overcoat pocket.

It was not a story he had thought either Andrew or Dave would appreciate - Philippe's values were so far removed from theirs as to make even giving the two things the same name seem somehow wrong. Ralph would have understood, of course, but the burden of that little rectangle of leather and paper, dried blood and obligation was too urgent to wait until Laurie could - he surprised himself with the stubbornness with which his brain refused to say "might" - discuss it with Ralph.

But for the meantime this smooth, slightly paunchy individual with the too-groomed hair and the concealed shrapnel scars, Laurie realised, would do. He would understand.

Baxter heard the story and nodded, gravely. Sure there were contacts he could invoke; people he could communicate with. Someone would be bound to know someone. It would be an honour to do what he could. He'd expect first publication rights if Laurie found there was an article in it, mind. That OK? He could contact Laurie by wire, after he left for Europe, of course? Via the F.A.U? Really? Unexpected, but: a fine organisation. He'd known a man who'd been wounded in the assault on Monte Cassino, who - now this might surprise Laurie -

It continued, unexpectedly, a good evening with nothing to mar it. Walking home - it was hardly more than a mile, and the few fugitive taxis were full, or going off duty - Laurie reflected that it had been the longest period he could remember in which he'd not worried over either Ralph or Andrew.

He lay awake beneath the thin blankets of the hotel trying to think why that might be so. But dawn had broken over the smoky slates of London before he abandoned the attempt to puzzle it out, and slept at last.

Laurie's plans to drive down to Felixstowe with Dave were summarily overturned when Challans called to tell him that after weeks of painstaking diplomacy he had managed to arrange a meeting with Morris. Stomach churning, Laurie automatically begun to demur. He was about to leave the country on a mercy mission - anyone would understand that one couldn't possibly find the time. Abruptly, a vision of Andrew's face as he had once seen it above Charlot's bed stopped his internal excuses before he could utter them.

Conscience apart, procrastination was a fool's trick anyway.

In the event, it was by no means as bad as he had feared. Morris was more concerned to distance himself pointedly and emphatically from his nephew than to press for his pound of flesh under the contract, and they emerged with a gentleman's agreement about the novel's future which, Laurie thought rather ruefully, was far more than he deserved.

Laurie was alive to the irony of the thought that a course he had consistently dismissed as both useless and unthinkable when Ralph had urged it on him - one of their worst rows had been occasioned by Laurie's having discovered a letter Ralph had drafted for him to send to Morris on the very subject - should have proved so easy once it was presented as the only possible course.

After the successful outcome of the meeting, a celebratory pint or so in the pub with Challans seemed indicated. They were mildly - though not unduly - surprised (the saloon bar at the Ring O' Bells was well-known as the preferred watering hole for half of literary London) to bump into Baxter, frowning earnestly into a pint of bitter with the air - as Laurie, recollecting a Ralphism of years before about a very different matter, thought - of someone trying solemnly to acquire a fashionable vice.

On finding that it was Laurie's last evening in London before embarkation Baxter insisted on turning the evening into something of a festivity. All three of them ended up having supper in Soho at a little restaurant whose proprietor's dealings with the Black Market, on the evidence on their plates before them, would scarcely bear scrutiny. In the course of what became a long, relaxed and hilarious evening Baxter dismissed out of hand Laurie's protestations that he needed to get away early to catch tomorrow's boat train from Liverpool Street. He, Baxter, had a car, and thanks to contemporary hunger for dollars he had petrol for it. He might just as well drive it to Felixstowe as not, and would be delighted to do so if Laurie would appreciate the lift.

A little after ten the next morning found them arriving on the quayside. The boat was already being loaded, though it would not sail until the evening, and Laurie had no difficulty in picking out Dave, taking a Customs official armed with a formidable sheaf of dockets painstakingly through their inventories.

Once released from his official duties Dave came over to greet them. Laurie felt he detected a certain polite restraint in Dave's reception of Baxter; a too-carefully charitable avoidance of reaching conclusions which might, after all, be unfair. He prickled, a little, on Baxter's behalf, before spotting that Baxter had no need at all of any championship; he had a faint air of amused detachment; the air of a man who had no particular concern about how anyone regarded him, either because his sense of self was unshakeably secure or because to one who was certain to be moving on tomorrow the enmities or suspicions of today were merely fleabites.

Laurie had not thought that this was a way of being which anyone could adopt other than as a conscious pose, but if Baxter had started out acting a part his face had grown to fit his mask. It was Dave who started to look just a little provincial - perhaps, even, a trifle narrow - in the face of Baxter's urbanity. Laurie, who liked both of them but had debts of loyalty to Dave, began to be sorry he had unwittingly engineered the meeting.

It was a relief when the arrival of a pre-War, battered and exceptionally noisy Baby Austin provided a distraction.

"Ah," Dave said, "Andrew. I was starting to get worried. There was a lot of ice on the road this morning, and I expect there'd have been more on the Cambridge side."

Andrew extricated himself from the driver's seat, and waved cheerfully at them. Laurie was moving towards him before he spotted that Andrew had walked round to the passenger side, and was opening the door to allow a shy, pretty young woman to emerge. The folds of her well-worn navy wool coat were, hanging off so slight a frame, hardly sufficient to disguise the unequivocal jutting statement of her stomach.

Laurie caught his breath. With an unconsciously proprietorial air Andrew slid his arm round her shoulders.

"Rebecca," he said, "this is Laurie. I've told you how we couldn't have managed a thing without him. But I owe him much more than that, of course. Laurie: my wife, Rebecca."

Odd, Laurie had thought once when under fire, how the most inconsequential thoughts came to one when one was closest to utter annihilation. It was true now, too.

One term Carter had set off a craze for dabbling in amateur psychology. Anyone else in the School would instantly have been labelled "crank", but Carter was too patently the beau ideal of healthy schoolboy normalcy; besides, his mother was American, which was thought to give him leeway as regards matters of that kind. It hadn't amounted to very much, but there had been a game which had been very popular at the time; passing around printed cards and being asked to identify what one saw in the designs on them, upon which one's contemporaries would seek to draw rather puerile conclusions about the workings of one's psyche.

Laurie could still remember with a sharp mix first of revelation and, inexplicably, disappointment how he had felt as the classical lines of the white vase he had originally seen on the page mutated into a pair of human profiles in silhouette, endlessly regarding each other. And, of course, once one had seen it, one could never go back to the pure simplicity of the original vision.

_And, little town, thy streets for ever more will silent be/ and not a soul to tell why thou art desolate can e'er return._

But even as he thought it, he realised its absurdity. For the point of the game - if it had any point at all - was that both faces and vase were there from the very beginning. It was all in what one's eye, under the direction of one's subconscious, chose either to pick out or to ignore.

All this had passed in a split second; Andrew could have detected nothing of it.

Laurie moved forwards, murmuring some suitable platitudes, feeling as he had after his operations, when the anaesthetic was just wearing off, and he knew the real pain would start any second.

And surely Andrew would guess something was wrong; no doubt Laurie had gone supernaturally white. But - wholly unexpectedly - Baxter was covering for him; moving forward with smooth self-introductions and congratulations. Furthermore, with a detached interest (in any circumstances but these it might have been a blazing antagonism) Laurie noted that Baxter was quite clearly aware of and - if not quite encouraging, at least not doing anything to prevent - the assumptions which the others might be drawing about his precise role with Laurie on the quayside.

In the circumstances Laurie could feel nothing but gratitude for the chance he was being given to make a muttered, temporary escape. He stumbled to a brief sanctuary in the shadow of the lorry.

Dave found him there a few seconds later. His expression of concern was overlying something more complex, something being tamped down with an act of sheer will-power.

"You didn't get my letter, then, about Andrew's marriage?"

The tone made it not a question. Laurie shook his head, dully.

"The post out to the Rock's been - well, never mind. How long - ?"

Dave considered. "Well, they married in February. But they'd known each other for almost a year by then. Rebecca's brother was a member of our Ambulance unit."

"Oh. I see."

Dave's tone was so consciously gentle that it was, in itself, a reproach. "We were all very fond of James."

The deliberate emphasis on the past tense told its own story. Laurie blinked: there seemed to be a great weariness pressing down his eyelids.

"What happened?"

Dave shrugged. "A landmine. Quick, at least, which is something. You know how these things go. Andrew, of course, wanted to return James's things to his sister in person once he got back to England; he felt it was the least he could do. I suppose it all happened from there.

"And _is_ she very like him?" The words slipped out beyond his conscious control; his face must be telling its own story, too. Dave's face was grave, non-judgmental as always.

"You know, one of the things I've thought over my life is that love is as much a mystery as it is a gift, and never more so as when one thinks that the explanation is obvious." He paused, evidently weighing two competing obligations in his head. His next words seemed as if they had been dragged out of him.

"Does it make any difference? To you, I mean."

More to buy himself time than anything Laurie thrust his hand into a pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. His hand brushed against something which at first he failed to recognise, but as his fingers closed round it he recognised the scarred and bloodstained leather of the diary.

It recalled him to himself. There were, after all, very much worse things which could happen to one in this world than not knowing which of two distinct varieties of idiot one had made of oneself. Did it matter whether he was mourning something he had had and lost, or something he had never had a chance of having in the first place?

And - another stabbing revelation - how much cruelty had his delusions - if that was the proper word for them - caused elsewhere, over the years?

_"He'll come back in a year or so and tell you about his boyfriend: that one's a classic, don't you know?"_

Oh, God. The sheer arrogance of youth, not even bothering to distinguish between cynicism and anguish. Too late, he recognised the note Ralph's voice had had on that evening long ago. It was an effort to keep the same note out of his own voice as he responded to Dave. But the weariness was heavier than anything; it had the weight of his own folly, which was infinite and thus crushing.

"I suppose not." Laurie found the cigarettes at last, offered the packet to Dave, who accepted, and lit them both from the same match.

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled on a long breath that was almost a sigh. "Could you let Andrew know I expect we can manage to load the lorry and so forth on board between us? I suppose - all things considered - he won't really want to come on board until the last minute, and - well, neither of them ought to have to worry about anything else at a time like this, should they?"

Something flickered behind Dave's eyes. Perhaps - Laurie hoped - it was an echo of a grave respect.

"I'll be sure to let him know," he said, and was gone.


	12. Chapter 12

Laurie had not expected either Dave or Andrew to be poor sailors, but both of them had ducked below and into their cabins as soon as the boat had left Felixstowe. Those cabins were another blessing owing to Baxter: Laurie's imagination frankly failed him at how he might have coped had he been expected to share, in the circumstances.

Left to his own devices, Laurie had essayed a drink or so in the grim ship's bar, and then retreated to his own quarters.

Sleep, however, proved elusive.

A previous passenger had left a slightly bound popular novel in the berth. As the boat thrust its way out over the North Sea Laurie read doggedly onwards.

_Last night I dreamed we went to Manderley again._

Gradually the passivity of Maxim de Winter chafed against his spirit. His had been a great crime, no doubt, but one set against a great wrong. Why should society demand of the protagonists that they eke out a futile, etiolated existence on the margins of Europe?

Why, indeed?

The North Sea was calm: his fragmented glance through the porthole showed an oily dark sea and a blaze of stars above. He recalled Ralph's words about being able to think more clearly at sea. There was such infinite perspective in those stabbing points of light.

Laurie reached for his writing-case.

 _Dear Ralph_ , he began.

_As I expect you've guessed, I've tried and failed to write this letter half a dozen times or so._

_The postmark will probably come as a surprise; and if you were to ask me what I'm doing here I'm not sure I could tell you. But you, above anyone else, showed me that the important thing was to work out as a human being, and part of that has to be finding one's own purpose in life: something that presents itself as something that must be done, not to impress someone else or to avoid difficulties or anything of that sort, but because the thing is worth doing in itself. I think I've found that with what I'm doing now. You may think yourself justified in being sceptical, and maybe even more so when I tell you more of the details but I can only ask you to trust me. After all, that's all it can ever come down to between two people if anything's going to mean anything worthwhile. I can see that now._

Laurie paused and looked out through the porthole at the dark sea heaving sluggishly, the reflected light from the ship only emphasising the incomprehensible blackness of what lay beneath.

They must be coming close to the shoal waters of the Dutch seaboard by now. One still heard of stray mines causing havoc for shipping in these waters, and Ralph had shown him enough charts for him to realise that they were passing over the graveyards of murdered ships which lay on the sea-bed below, thicker than blackberries in autumn.

Laurie, suppressing a twinge of uneasiness, turned back to his writing block.

_I expect to be in Germany for the next three months or so, though it may be longer; if this winter is as harsh as last there will be a lot to be done to relieve hardship, even on the smallest scale, and I've set myself the task of reporting how that goes. I'm writing for an American magazine -_

He gave title and publisher, not for their snob value - though they were prestigious enough - nor even because he imagined Ralph scouring the news-stands in obscure ports in the hope of finding what he had written, but for severely practical reasons. On their way down to Felixstowe Baxter had with calm insistence asked that Laurie gave him next of kin details for, as he observed, while no sensible man went looking for trouble, with the spectres of famine and civil strife hovering over dismembered Germany, and four mutually suspicious occupying Powers jockeying for position amid the ruins of Europe, Laurie had better appreciate now - if he hadn't already - that whatever could happen in this world could happen to him, and should make his arrangements accordingly.

Laurie added a line or so to the letter, to the effect that contacting him via his publishers was probably the quickest in any crisis.

_I've made sure that they have your details, too, just in case._

He hesitated for a moment, and then wrote on.

_Baxter - my publisher - is going to be back in New York in the next month and you might want to look him up if you get leave. He's been extremely decent about things and I owe him a lot._

It was tempting to go into detail; during the evening at the Savoy Baxter had made a number of shrewd observations about the state of Spain (he'd met Guittierez in Salamanca, apparently, and been mightily impressed by him) which Laurie had longed to be able to share with Ralph.

But it would only be postponing what he really needed to say. With a sigh Laurie refilled the reservoir of his fountain pen from the ink-bottle, and continued.

_The only thing I know is that for the first time I feel I am going towards something rather than away. I almost said, for the first time since the War, but on reflection I realise that even then joining up was a nice tidy way of getting out of the Charles mess and proving something to myself about courage and so forth for people like me. That was a question that shouldn't, I suppose, have needed asking: they'd have looked at you as if you were mad if you'd even thought of drawing that sort of connection in Athens or in Thebes._

He thought for a moment, and then added,

_I see now that things were quite different for you; but then, you had had a chance to see for yourself how things were going on the Continent and in the Far East, and to talk to all sorts of people about it, too, whereas I'd only heard people chattering the sort of idiotic abstractions - Left and Right both - that you get at Oxford, and not thought much of either side. When it came, too, the real thing was such chaos, and over almost for me before I knew what was happening._

Now there was no escaping it: this was the painful bit, and no mistake. Laurie set his teeth and pressed doggedly on.

_I suppose that's why when I came across Andrew, who'd actually given the alternatives thought and was willing to talk about it on a completely different level to anything I'd come across before I was so struck by it, and too ready to assume that because my position was something I'd arrived at through a mess of unexamined assumptions and a blind funk at being seen to be different everyone else on my "side" must be similarly unable to account for themselves. As an assumption about you it was unforgivable, and it caused a lot of trouble in the long run; like in those Mohammedan countries where the testimony of an unbeliever counts for only half, in the courts._

The next bit was even more difficult, for he had loyalties in two directions. He crossed out several false starts. There were things that could only be said, after all, face to face, if he ever got the chance.

_If there's one thing I regret more than anything else, it's not having the gumption - to be honest, the basic common decency - to give any proper thought to what you were going through when we met again after Dunkirk. Yes: a lot of things had overwhelmed me at once, but that's a fool's excuse. And it doesn't let me off my inability to see what should have been right in front of my nose._

So far so good: now for it.

_The fact is, I was running away from something I'd brushed up against and detested, and - although it's taken me long enough to realise it - I was just as ready to lump everything together when it came to the physical side of things as some old buffer of a magistrate, who honestly can't tell the difference between "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe" and dirty postcards from some Charing Cross backstreet. And the converse, too. That is; I realised from the first that what I felt for Andrew was impossible - I mean, from his point of view: I wonder now if a Freudian wouldn't tell me that was the whole point. It gave me the endless luxury of not having to make my mind up, and having Fate do it for me, and giving me the chance to strike high-minded moral attitudes._

He paused; a random, inconsistent thought struck him for what felt like the first time.

_I'm surprised you were generous enough to put up with any of it: you never had much time for "highfalutin' pi nonsense" when people indulged in it at School. Anyway, when everything went smash I should have been honest with you at the time, in the flat, rather than pretending I'd noticed nothing. I dressed it up for myself as not wanting to hurt you any more than you'd been hurt already, and to do myself justice there really was a lot of that in it, but there was also not wanting to admit that all along I'd been treating flesh and blood people as though they were characters in a novel I was writing and could be pushed around into whatever attitudes I chose for them to take up: not that you can really do that to characters in books, either, or Morris would have had his MS long ago!_

_Anyway: I behaved rottenly, and told myself it was being noble; I made the world's worst idiot of myself in the process, and nearly tore us both apart. If apologies mean anything at all in such a case, believe me you have all of mine I could possibly offer._

That hurdle over, he succinctly described the current set-up, resisting the urge to add any commentary to the bare information that Andrew was married and shortly to become a father. He dreaded that Ralph would feel that he had gone to seek solace elsewhere, and only been driven to return when he realised it was impossible, but however it had arisen the situation was as it was, and he resisted the temptation to gloss or conceal; the fact that he was going on with his self-appointed task when any possible ulterior motive had been rendered comprehensively moot must speak for itself.

He added a brief paragraph about Philippe's diary - it was the sort of thing Ralph would be interested in, and he might have useful contacts or suggestions.

When he had finished that he found no longer needed the lamp: the porthole was flooding the cabin with a pale grey light. When he looked out he could discern a band of darker grey low on the horizon which might, perhaps, be low cloud but which he felt, instinctively, was land. Dawn was breaking over Europe.

_I hope_ \- he began in conclusion, and then struck it through.

_Whatever you want to do, I can't imagine that I'd come so close to happiness as I have if it hadn't been for you. I've made a mess of a lot of things, but if I've made a mess of that then it's the one I shall regret most truly, and for the rest of my life. But it doesn't take away what we've had, too, however you decide_

_I'm not asking for anything other than what you choose to give, and your generosity has already been stretched far more than I deserve, but believe me that if you think we can go on together and you want to take that chance it will make me happier than anything else I can imagine. My love you will always have, whatever happens. If I could be sure that you believed that, it would make everything else insignificant._

Above his head booted feet rang on the deck, and there was the sound of terse, barked orders, and the swishing sound of water as the decks were hosed down. The boat was waking up around him.

Laurie signed the letter, sealed its envelope and tucked it in his writing-case, ready to post on landing. He had made his throw of the dice; the rest lay with the gods. Drained, grey as the dawn, but curiously at peace he made his way up on deck to watch the boat come safely into port.


	13. Epilogue

The wind blowing off the water had a keen edge. It reminded one that even the majestic passenger liners were still taking due note of ice warnings on their inbound and outbound journeys, and that May was not yet so far advanced as to preclude the possibility of a last, late snowstorm.

This part of the waterfront was far from the patrician enclave reserved to the passenger traffic. Here cranes worked ceaselessly to unload the holds of the incoming freighters and trucks waited to rush the cargo to the rail-heads; the visible part of a vast machine whose unceasing energies were dedicated to slaking the insatiable hungers of the most powerful nation on earth.

The young man passing briskly - despite his visible limp - through the district had turned the collar of his coat against the cold, and kept his soft hat down over his ears. From time to time he consulted directions on a piece of paper.

Not without a false turn or so the young man found his destination at last; a small eating establishment - hard to say, in this mongrel district, how to describe it more precisely. It clearly had pretensions to restaurant status: its clientele was drawn from among the commercial agents and merchant skippers, not the stevedores of the waterfront. But it seemed unlikely that anyone not drawn by business into the neighbourhood would have considered it worth the detour. Accordingly, as the young man entered a few heads turned curiously after him; although strangers were plentiful in this place where the machine demanded the tireless labours of an army of transients few were of his type, and those who were spelled trouble more often than not. A journalist - an earnest and worthy compiler of statistics - even, perhaps, a spy.

There was a visible easing of tension when a diner in one of the booths - who would have been instantly recognisable as a British ship's officer even if he had not been in uniform - spotted the new arrival and signalled with a lazy wave of his arm.

The young man nodded, and picked his way through the packed tables towards his friend. His mouth had opened to say something when the man in uniform reached out a hand to clasp his wrist firmly.

"Welcome home, Spud," he said.

**Author's Note:**

> Downloadable ebook available [ here](http://ajhall.shoesforindustry.net/ebooks/bycategory/6/223/Mary-Renault/)
> 
> Follow @ajhall_fics on Twitter for further news and updates.


End file.
